Please Support Study Abroad for International Business Students!

Our Give Day Objective: raise enough funds to give EVERY IBUS student studying abroad for at least a term $1000 toward expenses.

Our Give Day Goal: $14,000, $2,000 more than last year.

Professor Roehl and several alums have pledged to match the first $7000 contributed by IBUS alumni and friends. Surely the other 600 of you can contribute as much as these generous donors. Even small donations add up and show wide alumni support for the program.

The International Business Study Abroad Scholarship

Your WWU Give Day donation will allow us to provide stipends toward airfare for each of our IBUS students to help them travel and gain professional experience abroad. Studies and data from our own alumni confirm that those who have meaningful study-abroad experiences have better career opportunities.

While scholarships exist for tuition, the cost of airfare is a major barrier for many of our students who wish to travel abroad. This stipend will open the doors for these students and give them a global experience they will bring back to Western’s campus. With your contributions, we can give these $1,000 stipends to all who study abroad, not just to the 'best' students.

Last year, twenty-one alums gave $11,000 to support international study for current IBUS students. This allowed us to give all majors and minors $1000 stipends to support their studies in the 2025-26 academic year. With continually increasing interest in study abroad by our students, we are hoping more alums and supporters will participate this year, and hopefully those who supported us last year will find it possible to be more generous.

Our five international business professors give our students a broad grounding in international business concepts. The wide perspectives (Ted Alden in public policy; Shih-Fen Chen in marketing; Skylar Powell in organization theory; Tom Roehl in economics and East Asia; Shantala Samant in strategy and emerging markets) give academic breadth to the students. However, we know there is more to learning than the classroom experience in Bellingham, so we want to add to our classroom training the experience that study abroad gives to our students. As Professor Roehl puts it, let them learn to: 'Be comfortable being uncomfortable.'

Roehl's teaching philosophy was the focus of a WWU Windows article recently. You can check it out at the following link:

https://window.wwu.edu/roehl-way

IBUS Program News

We have good news on the slow but steady recovery of interest in the international business program. After majors had dropped to the low fifties after COVID, we are now back to seventy-five. To try to attract incoming students (we can now admit first years), Skylar is teaching the 200-level Intro to Business class to encourage more to choose CBE and make a stronger case for international business.

Market Research Projects with Local Firms

As we approach the 200-level of projects done, our students again took on challenging projects. Scheduling limited the class to one of the terms. We did a social media project for ADW Acosta, the COSTCO broker. We looked for new European markets for ‘cowboy boats’ now sourcing and depositing fish at a Neah Bay firm. Finding African markets for a Portland firm’s EV minitrucks challenged that team. Another group tried to find ways to let small WA wineries position themselves in Asia.

Many local firms have been bought out, making many ‘traditional’ Whatcom firms no longer available as international passes to national or international headquarters. Making initial contact through phone is challenging, something we hear even from business professionals. So, if you know of projects, please let us know.

Club Activity

The International Business Network (IBN) student club has become more vibrant in the last year.

Meeting every other week with ten to fifteen students, they have welcomed video presentations from both experienced senior IBUS alums and younger alums who can speak to the early-career issues they are facing. The IBN has done social events and programs to highlight non-business alternatives after graduation. For the first time in several years, they coordinated a field trip to Seattle at Boeing Renton and PACCAR. Senior managers hosted, and middle managers with Western connections were our guides.

We thus solidified our Boeing relationship with their field trip with MSCM students.  In both cases, IBUS alums participated in the panels after the tours. Your Give Day contributions to the ‘get students out of Bellingham’ fund from previous years helped pay for the bus.

NASBITE

With no potential to present face-to-face at the finals, we chose not to participate.  Hopefully, next year it will be more attractive, with a better pool of IBUS students who have taken IBUS 473.

Faculty contribute in areas other than classroom teaching.

Ted Alden

Ted’s co-written book “When the World Closed Its Doors: The Covid-19 Tragedy and the Future of Borders,” was published by Oxford University Press in January 2025. He is also a senior fellow at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations and a columnist for Foreign Policy. He continues to talk about these issues in our region, often at Washington Council on International Trade events.

 Shih-Fen Chen

Shih-Fen is an experienced case teacher and case writer who has developed more than 20 case studies. Many of his cases draw on companies in his native Taiwan. His case on 7-Eleven Taiwan led to his being featured in two national news reports by the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.

Skylar Powell

Skylar Powell has continued to work on a project with two researchers at the University College of London. The project aims to understand the role of self-construals, or self-concept, which can be culturally embedded, in changing our attention to different types of feedback. Experimental data was collected in South Korea and the United States, and the project has already resulted in two peer-reviewed journal publications. A third study is currently under review. Skylar is also currently in the process of writing a grant application with another researcher at the University College London for a different research project.

Shantala Samant

Shantala is working on research examining the activities of firms from emerging economies and alliances in the bio-pharmaceutical industry. She has recently started teaching a course on Business in Emerging Economies focused on development, policy, and business strategies in these countries.

Tom Roehl

Tom is continuing his research on the value of study abroad and experiential learning (the projects class) on the career patterns of WWU graduates. He has used the data from this academic research to keep an updated list of alumni. We post a comment on our LinkedIn group, WWU International Business Alumni, each year with any job trends we observe on the research database. If you have not joined, send Professor Roehl a request to do so. We try to send this alumni list to anyone we see in this LinkedIn group who posts about a job loss or explicit interest in a job change. Anyone can request the list from Professor Roehl (a general distribution is not allowed under WWU rules, unfortunately).

The Many Ways Alums Can Help the International Business Program

We know that many of you are not in a position to make financial contributions at a given time. Remember that you can help in so many other ways as well. You can let us know about internships and jobs (maybe even posting to the LinkedIn group as job openings appear at your firm); you can assist current students interested in your company or field of expertise. You can pitch Western’s international business program to family and friends looking for universities for their children. This is increasingly important as we struggle to build enrollment from the COVID-19 downturn.  

I hope we can call on you to help our twenty-five winter and spring IBUS graduates make the transition to the job market. It would be great if you would respond to requests for ‘informationals’ that help current graduates focus their job search. If your firm or someone in your network is hiring, I will be glad to post the opening on our Canvas sites for IBUS students.

We thank many of you for supporting these initiatives on Give Day over the past few years. We were the best among the smaller business school programs for the fifth year in a row in terms of contributions.

Thank you for considering supporting the International Business program. We look forward to face-to-face interaction in the future.