In an effort to entice students to go to China, the University of Dayton is offering American students who travel to the university’s new China Institute to take courses this summer $3,000 for expenditures.
“What we’re saying is if you have the possibility of being able to go to classes this summer we would like for you to go and pay the full tuition and in turn we will give you a scholarship which will roughly cover expenses,” Phil Doepker, UDCI coordinator for industrial and technical relations, said.
The $3,000 scholarship is intended to “cover international airfare, housing, in-country transportation and tours,” according to Doepker and Scott Segalewitz, a fellow UDCI coordinator.
The UDCI summer session will begin about a week after the spring semester ends in May and students will be enrolled in three courses for six weeks for a total of nine credit hours. Offered are two engineering courses, EGR 323 Project Management and EGR 299 Innovative Design and Entrepreneurship, and one communication course, CMS 316 Intercultural Communication, which also counts as a social science course. Doepker, though, classified all three as interdisciplinary courses.
The institute is in the Suzhou Industrial Park, an industrial-residential expanse that is the still-growing result of two decades of Chinese-Singaporean collaboration. The SIP is home to some 2 million people and 4,000 businesses. More than 150 Fortune 500 companies are represented in the SIP and several, including General Electric, Lily Pharmaceuticals, Emerson Manufacturing and Delphi, work with the institute, according to a brochure about UDCI.
The SIP is located about 70 miles west of Shanghai near the northeast coast of China. The southern region of the SIP is host to the main UDCI building, which many Dayton students would find familiar as it copies from the design of Kettering Labs.
The structure, known locally as “the Building at BIO-BAY C17,” houses the educational, administrative and research facilities of UDCI.
“This building,” Doepker said in reference to the UDCI facility, “is like half of Kettering Labs. If you walked through Kettering Labs, cut it in half, it would be a mirror image of it.”
According to President Dan Curran, “We’re providing our students with international opportunities few campuses can offer.”
The deadline to apply for the opportunity to study abroad in China at the UDCI is Friday, March 15.
