Cal State Long Beach sent 13 students to Taipei City, Taiwan, in September on fully paid scholarships to spend the 2007-08 academic year at Ming Chuan University.
MCU is a family-owned university that was founded in 1963 and is known in Taiwan for its specialization in business and management.
John Tsuchida, chairman of the Asian and Asian American studies department, launched the beginning of the international exchange program with MCU after making arrangements with the university's dean of law.
"The biggest obstacle going overseas is finance," said Tsuchida, "and our job is to make it possible for students to experience studying abroad."
In this program's first year, MCU accepted all of the 13 students who applied for the one-way exchange and provided them with free tuition and board. In addition, the Taipei Economic Cultural Office, located in Los Angeles, donated money toward the students' airfare and awarded two of them with additional $10,000 scholarships.
Some of the students who were selected were personally recruited by professors from the AAAS department. According to Chad Tsuyuki, the AAAS department's administrative support coordinator, the students who were chosen to study abroad at MCU have diverse majors.
Candace Walsh, one of the selected students, is an English major with an emphasis in creative writing, and graduate student Man Ng is majoring in Asian studies.
Regardless of their majors, the students will be taking an array of Mandarin classes, and have been assigned accordingly based on their skill levels.
Tsuchida said that the goal of this program is to "make students more global. American students do not think speaking a foreign language is an asset these days, but it is."
In an effort to expand the cultural and language learning process even further, one of MCU's faculty members, Joe Wang, set up a home-sponsoring program for the students from CSULB. Different families in Taipei volunteered to host some of the students and allowed them to visit their homes.
Although this supplementary learning experience was offered to all 13 students, only a few of them took it.
Man Ng, one of the students that signed up for the home-sponsoring program, said "[He] learned Chinese better with a host family than in class." "I personally am enjoying learning Chinese here and experiencing the culture in Taiwan. I think this was a great trade-off."
The students will be returning at the end of MCU's spring semester in July and as far as the future of the exchange program goes, Tsuchida said he has plans to improve and establish stable ties with MCU. He is working on a semester program for those students who cannot commit to a year-long session.
He understands that most college students have job commitments or other circumstances that they cannot sacrifice by going abroad.
Also in consideration is a summer program next year for students who have taken one or two Chinese language classes and are interested in studying in Taiwan.
"There are a lot of intangible benefits from studying abroad, and our job here is to make opportunities happen," Tsuchida said.
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