2018 Michael Chang scholarship winner Hillary Phu thriving in Bay Area

Time is not something Hillary Phu has had much of since winning the Michael Chang Scholarship in 2018. 

But then again, there aren’t many 20-year olds with Phu’s resume. 

Phu earned her B.A. in History and Sociology from UCLA in 2020 - just in time for the coronavirus pandemic to sidetrack most of her plans.

“I didn’t even plan on going to grad school right after undergrad just because I knew that I was graduating from undergrad at a pretty young age,” she said. 

The Michael Chang Scholarship was part of what made that possible and Phu is still an advocate for USTA NorCal scholarships. She says it’s important that anyone applying for a scholarship focus on telling their story, not cut and paste from a prompt. 

“When you write your scholarship essays, don’t try to write something because someone else tries to tell you to write about a different topic,” she says. “Don’t try to cater your essay just because you want to fit it to an application. I personally feel like my essays were something that meant a lot to me. I sat down and I wrote all my thoughts out of why the scholarship meant so much to me and I think you really have to look back in your lifetime. Especially when you’re applying for a tennis scholarship, you have to think about how much you’ve grown from the time that you started to where you are now. Whether that’s one year or ten years, you have grown a significant amount from the time you started playing tennis to where you are today and you just have to figure out what that is.”

With plans like traveling and taking a gap year out the window, she knew her next step would be something in sports and decided to continue her education sooner than later. The University of San Francisco was an obvious choice.

“I was born and raised here so being close to home was something that was important to me,” she said. “I wanted to stay near my parents and family, as well as my lifelong friends that I made.”

Now Phu is on track to receive her Masters in Sports Management from USF in 2022 and on top of being able to be near her family, she’s well positioned in California to be near one of the biggest epicenters of the sports industry in the bay area. 

She’s currently interning with the US Women’s Open Championship golf tournament which combined with her master’s program, has her working seven days per week most of the time. Phu’s ultimate goal is to work in some capacity at the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. 

Sports management can take many different forms but it fills a unique space for Phu in that she can work in her desired industry while helping people and with her plan to work in international sports, she can also fulfill her desire to travel. 

“Traveling is something that I’ve always wanted to do but never thought to being in a low-income household,” she explained. “I wanted to study abroad in undergrad but of course, I couldn’t do that because of the pandemic. I also couldn’t take a gap year and travel the world after graduating so being in international sports is one of my top priorities.”

More important than traveling though is Phu’s requirement that her career be directly involved with helping people which played a large part in her choice to study Sociology at UCLA. 

“I want to work within anything that impacts the greater good of sports,” she explained. “Knowing that I can impact someone’s life because of the experience that I had watching the Olympic Games growing up or watching college athletics growing up - all these different experiences shaped how I perceive sports today and I just hope that I can carry on with that.”