Six of Taiwan’s top students participated in home stays this week with Pacific Lutheran faculty, who hope more students from Taiwan will soon call PLU home.
“For students from Asia who want special training, PLU is like a hidden treasure,” history professor Mahlon Meyer said. The students arrived in Tacoma Wednesday night. While on campus Thursday morning, the students attended interactive classes where they practiced diplomacy and experienced pedagogy.
Thursday afternoon the students visited Evergreen shipping in Tacoma before returning to PLU to give a performance and share the art of calligraphy with other students.
Junior Megan Larsen attended the event and said she had “gotten some really great insight into Taiwanese culture.”
After their performance, the ambassadors had dinner with President Krise. Friday morning, the students visited Mt. Rainier and then traveled back to Taiwan, ending their two-week stay in America. Prior to visiting Washington, the students sat in on classes at Stanford University and visited San Francisco.
PLU has 28 Chinese students, who come from China and Taiwan, currently enrolled on campus. An agency places Chinese students with PLU. Meyer said the agent who brought the ambassadors to campus “was blown away” by the interactive classes.
A DVD of the activities and testimonials of the ambassadors is in production to market PLU in China with the agency. Meyer said there are three main reasons to market PLU in China: to expose PLU students to greater global diversity, to give students from China and Taiwan an experience they would not get anywhere else, and to raise the prestige of PLU.
The students then become “young ambassadors not just for Taiwan, but for PLU,” Meyer said.
