OxStars: Amanda Yu-Nguyen

In a field where professionals often move from campus to campus, Yu-Nguyen chose to stay. For more than 15 years, the Oxford community has shaped her work, and in turn, she has helped shape the student experience.

To many students, that experience can feel like a steep, relentless climb. It’s a metaphor Yu-Nguyen knows well. Having summited Mount Kilimanjaro, one of the world’s Seven Summits, she brings those lessons of perseverance and balance into her role as Director of the Center for Healthful Living.

Drawing on her graduate studies in health promotion and an established belief in the power of community, she has spent over a decade and a half redefining what it means to be a "healthy" student. For Yu-Nguyen, wellbeing isn’t just something she teaches; it’s something she continues to learn. Balancing the needs of an entire campus with her own hasn’t been simple.

For her, that includes setting boundaries, knowing when to step back, and relying on others for support. What was once difficult as a young professional has become central to how she approaches both her work and her life.

That commitment to growth and learning isn’t just something that Yu-Nguyen encourages in others; it’s something she actively seeks out in her own life and daily routine. In many ways, Yu-Nguyen’s approach to her own wellbeing mirrors the advice she gives students every day. At Oxford, she encourages students to move in ways that feel meaningful to them and to also find challenges that align with their interests, which will allow them to push their limits. 

For Yu-Nguyen, she began to consider what it might look like to challenge herself in a completely new way as she approached a milestone birthday. That ambitious challenge took the form of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. Already an active person, she saw the experience as an opportunity to push beyond her comfort zone and explore just how much she was capable of. 

During her ascent to the top, she recalls the stark change in temperature from the warm African air and sun hitting her skin to reaching the false summit, a point in the climb where it became blustery cold, snow was on the ground, altitude had changed, and exhaustion was kicking in. The thought of quitting was slowly creeping into her mind. But it was in that moment that she found herself returning to the same conversations she often has with her students. “I have this conversation with my peer educators often,” she says, “about when to push through discomfort to get to growth, and the difference between unsafe and uncomfortable.” On the mountain, she realized she was not in danger; she was simply uncomfortable. And so, drawing on the mindset she encourages in others, she pushed forward. It’s a lesson she continues to share with students: that discomfort is often a part of growth, and that pushing through those moments can lead to something meaningful on the other side. For her, that moment was reaching the summit—an experience she describes as both challenging and deeply rewarding.

Reflecting on the climb, Yu-Nguyen says the experience reshaped how she thinks about both physical and personal limits. “The human body is capable of a lot more than we may think,” she explains. Climbing one of the world's highest peaks redefined her understanding of resilience. That realization now informs how she approaches her work with students at Oxford during one of the most challenging times of their young adult lives. Often faced with uncertainty about the future, new challenges in a new environment, and unfamiliar expectations from themselves, their families, professors, and even their peers, many students are navigating these experiences for the first time, which can feel very overwhelming. Her goal is to bridge that gap between fear and capability. "When you're navigating those first two years, there’s a lot you don’t know, and that can feel really uneasy." By leaning into her own experiences with the unknown, she helps students realize that while the climb is scary, "there is a good other side." 

That commitment to helping students navigate uncertainty is reflected in the Center for Healthful Living’s work. Through a range of programs, including stress busters and recreational experiences, Yu-Nguyen encourages students to engage with challenges in ways that feel both exciting and accessible. 

“It’s about leading from a place of curiosity,” she says. By reframing unfamiliar experiences as opportunities rather than obstacles, she hopes students feel supported as they continue to grow and navigate their own paths.

After fifteen years of navigating the high-pressure terrain of campus life and the rugged slopes of world-class peaks, Yu-Nguyen’s focus remains exactly where it started: on the horizon. For her, the ultimate success of the Center for Healthful Living isn't something that can be captured in a yearly report. It is something much quieter and more enduring.

Ensuring that the seeds planted today will provide shade for generations of Oxford students to come. She knows that true wellness isn't measured in a single semester or a single graduation day, but in the lifelong habits students carry with them when they leave Oxford’s campus.