09/14/2026
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Loving Father and Husband, Foodie, former NASM CPT, Health and Fitness Coach, Gamer, workout ju**ie and bio-hacker
Until about the age of 23 I was fairly active and involved in numerous sports. With many life changes; marriage, kids, career moves, I lost track of my priorities. I forgot what was most important to me and forgot who I was. Over the years I had really let myself go, with my weight reaching as high as 260+lbs. Finally in the spring of 2012, I knew that I had to change for both me and my family. I
09/14/2026
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Andrew Nguyen was 22 when most of his Yale classmates were still deciding on a major.
He'd already spent it — more than four years of it — as a Team Leader in 1st Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, one of the Army's most demanding special operations units. Rangers don't get easy missions. They run special operations raids, seize airfields, conduct reconnaissance in places most soldiers never see.
Nguyen's parents were the reason he signed up in the first place.
They came to America from Vietnam as teenagers in the mid-1970s. They loved what the country gave them. Nguyen grew up hearing that. So when it came time to serve, he didn't pick something conventional.
"I chose the Army Rangers because I wanted to tough it out with the toughest," he said.
He got what he asked for. Four years stationed at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, Georgia. A deployment to South Korea. Then two combat tours in Afghanistan.
By the time he left the military, he wasn't the same person who enlisted. Almost nobody is.
In 2018, he enrolled at Yale through the Eli Whitney Students Program, built for veterans and other nontraditional students. He expected the transition to be hard. It was harder than he expected.
"Transitioning from an elite light-infantry unit to a college classroom was challenging," he admitted.
He stayed anyway. He majored in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. He mentored other veterans as an ambassador for the Warrior Scholar Project and Service to School, helping former service members believe they belonged at schools like his.
Then, senior year, Yale gave him the David Everett Chantler Award — reserved for the graduate who best embodies courage, strength of character, and moral purpose.
In 2022, he graduated. That same year, the Pat Tillman Foundation named him a Tillman Scholar — an honor tied to Pat Tillman, the NFL safety who walked away from his football career after September 11th and joined the Army Rangers. Tillman died while serving in Afghanistan in 2004. The scholarship in his name exists to fund people who keep serving in a different form.
Nguyen chose medicine.
That fall, he started at Harvard Medical School. He's aiming for orthopedic surgery — the kind of medicine that rebuilds what combat and time break down.
"I'm particularly excited to help elderly and combat-injured veterans," he said.
The Ranger Creed he lived by for four years says to shoulder more than your share of the task at hand. Nguyen never put that down. He just changed what the task was.
What do you do with the discipline you already have, once the mission changes?
09/13/2026