Monday, July 16, 2007

Discovering US Education 2007

I'm really sad that I can't attend this year's (July 22, 2007)Discover US Education Expo (I missed last year's by a few days) which will be held at Mid Valley from 10 to 6pm . I think the organizing committee has done a great job in putting this event together. You can read more about it at their website. I'll share my thoughts about the events below.

First of all, the organizing committee has managed to get a bunch of sponsors on board to defray the costs of the organizing the fair. These sponsors include the US Embassy, INTI, Taylors, HELP, Accenture, Citibank, WMU, Sunway College and so on (albeit at different 'levels' of sponsorship).

Secondly, they have a created a fun to read blog on some of their activities during the organization period. I especially liked the description of their school tours in Klang.

Thirdly, they've gotten together a good bunch of speakers for their seminars. The seminar speakers include both students as well as university administrators / academics including interviewers from MIT, Columbia and Princeton. I noticed a few familiar names in the line-up including Andrew Loh (Swarthmore) and Hwa Yang Jerng (Bates) who will be speaking on liberal arts education, Mr. Ong Jin Joo (Carnegie Mellon) and newly minted Dr. Ong Shien Jin (Harvard, MIT) who will be speaking on life experiences in the US.

I'm sure that it will be a fantastic expo and that the participants will come out with a better understanding of what an education in the US entails. I'd encourage all our readers to attend this expo, if not for yourself, then for your children or relatives or friends etc... Spread the word!

Personally speaking, I hope that this expo inspires more Malaysians to apply to the liberal arts colleges in the US, instead of the 'better known' universities such as Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton and so on. I think it's an experience which definitely more Malaysians benefit from.

2 comments:

Chen Chow said...

Thanks, Kian Ming for helping us to publicize.

This year, we would have 11 Liberal Arts Colleges there... Guess one of the biggest gathering of diverse LACs in Malaysia, if not the biggest.

Among those LACs include Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, Smith, Bates, Kenyon, Wabash, Wesleyan, Swarthmore, Oberlin, Bowdoin, Middlebury... A total of 11 of them.

Do come and grace the opening ceremony too at 9am, if you could make it!

Hope to see everyone there!

Kian Ming said...

Other than the well known colleges (Harvard, Stanford, etc...) and the 11 LACs noted by Chen Chow above, I want to draw attention to some of the other less known universities present at the expo. They include Case Western - pharmacy, the Georgia Institute of Technology (more popularly known as Georgia Tech) - good engineering programs, Penn state - aeronautical engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and Rochester Institute of Technology - engineering, Ohio State - Southeast Asian studies, Tufts - Fletcher school of Diplomacy, USC - film school, Virginia - ACC rival of Duke and one of the best state schools in the country. These are schools which I know of (or know someone from these schools). I'm sure others can tell us of the strength of some of the other universities who are involved in the expo but are not household names in Malaysia.