Window to the world
Looking at the most well-known figures in government, academia, and industry in Taiwan, a large proportion have returned from study abroad (especially in the US) in the last ten or 20 years. Back when Taiwan was a much more closed society, students who went abroad opened a window on the world for Taiwan. These returned students also brought glory days to Taiwan's economy.
Today, it's nothing special to have the chance to go overseas to study, and a more diversified value system has overturned the previous tradition of invariably studying in the US. The opening up of travel for the purpose of tourism has also allowed many people from different social strata to have the ability to experience foreign cultures.
For students in Taiwan, deciding whether to go abroad and what to study will never be questions that are out of fashion. Perhaps going abroad to study cannot guarantee a brilliant future. But it is worth the price of the ticket to see a different society, experience a different culture, improve your foreign language ability, broaden your perspective, and perhaps even open your heart.
Lin Hsien-ta
(interview by Teng Sue-feng/ tr. by Robert Taylor)
Twenty-eight-year-old Lin Hsien-ta graduated from the Graduate Institute of Mechanical Engineering at National Taiwan University. He has been awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study in the field of educational technology, and in July of this year he went to the University of Michigan in the USA.
I graduated from NTU's mechanical engineering department in 1996, and went straight into graduate school. After my military service I joined Yuen Foong Yu and worked for two years in their New Business Incubator.
150 people graduated from NTU's ME department in the same year as me. At present around 20 of them are studying overseas. About half of the students who graduated six or seven years earlier have studied overseas, so you can see that studying abroad is a lot less popular now. Most science and engineering graduates take the view that for a career in industry you don't need a PhD. If you just do a master's, the resources at NTU are more than adequate, so it's okay to do it in Taiwan.
My interests seem to have always been changing. At first I wanted to study business administration, but then I thought that before doing an MBA it would be best to have some work experience. That work happened to bring me into contact with speech recognition software and systems, and the company also had an online learning system that allowed the employees of all its subsidiaries to study over the Internet. This got me interested in educational technology. Looking back, in my second year in primary school I joined the Scouts, and a few years ago I got involved in adventure education activities. I think it's very special. Groups of people must design outdoor equipment from wooden posts and ropes. They have to overcome difficulties and solve problems together, which helps them develop communication and leadership skills. Adventure education goes back 30 years in the US, and is also a part of the educational technology field.
I wrote my master's dissertation on methods of engineering design. Because it touched on psychology and creative thinking, I sat in on many courses in other departments, such as cognitive psychology, neural networks in the computing department, and idea engineering in the electrical engineering department. During my master's course I looked at how mechanical systems can be integrated with computer technology, and for my PhD I'm planning to research how education can be integrated with science and technology. So I guess that little by little I have been changing tracks.
I hope I can finish my PhD within four years. In the future I hope I to go into academia, to research or teach. In fact I should also have opportunities to work in industry, because recently many companies have been growing through mergers, and it is important for them to get employees from different corporate cultures to work together as a team. This is one of the functions of adventure education, so I'm not worried about my future career opportunities. I know there is already an adventure education training center at Xiamen in mainland China, and in Taiwan an adventure training base was also set up this June at Acer's Aspire Park.
Studying in the States doesn't come cheap, but fortunately I was able to get a Fulbright scholarship. That will pay my tuition and living expenses for two years. The purpose of the scholarship is to promote Chinese-American cultural exchange. As far as I understand I did reasonably well in the interview, the field I'm studying in is very new, and the selection committee were very pleased to see an engineering student wanting to shift into education, so they were willing to give me the scholarship.