Professor Tai-Yen Chen and Professor Sue-Ming Yang presented the first PhD Programs Application Workshop

Encouraging Taiwanese students to study abroad is one of the key policies of the Ministry of Education. It has established a range of scholarship programs to encourage students to study abroad, and the United States is a highly popular study destination. The Education Division at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles—an overseas office of the Ministry—recently worked with Project Tyra - Taiwanese Young Researcher Association -  to hold a workshop to help students who want to apply to do doctoral programs in the US to prepare their applications. 

Project Tyra is an academic association for overseas students from Taiwan. It’s an online platform launched in 2015 by a group of Taiwanese studying overseas. Its current members are mainly doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers. 

Application start dates are still months away but Project Tyra held the first event of the PhD Programs Application Workshop Series on July 17. It gave students in Taiwan helpful advice on preparing a number of documents and required materials. Dr. Sue-Ming Yang, Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University, and Dr. Tai-Yen Chen, Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Houston who have been teaching at universities in the US for years gave presentations, walking the participating students through the application process. They gave practical tips and answered questions about writing a statement of purpose, and recommendation letters, and they recommended that students look at the research undertaken in recent years by the faculty of a number of universities that they’re considering applying to and then identify three labs that interest them. 

The first online workshop attracted more than 60 student participants. A second workshop, focusing on skills and strategies for writing application documents, will be held on August 28. Video recordings of these can be watched at https://projecttyra.blogspot.com/
In addition to providing a platform for members to maintain effective interaction with each other, the association aims to establish a real-time multinational academic information sharing platform. This will connect Taiwan academics from all over the world to exchange research achievements, and trends in various fields in academic circles overseas and in Taiwan.