Please Support Study Abroad for International Business Students!
Our Give Day Objective: Enough funds to give EVERY IBUS student studying abroad for at least a term $1000 toward expenses.
Our Give Day Goal: $14,000
Professor Roehl and several alums have pledged to match the first $7000 contributed by IBUS alumni and friends.
The International Business Study Abroad Scholarship
Your WWU Give Day donation will allow us to give stipends toward airfare to 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.
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
The international business projects class has passed 175 projects, giving another kind of challenge for our students. This year we did projects for large and small firms. For large firms, we found new Asian products to bring back and sell to COSTCO (ADW Acosta) and identified new ways to sell more arborist ropes in Europe (Samson Rope). A small but fast-growing Cosmetics firm needed ways to expand its beachhead in Japan (Morgan Cosmetics). Two small start ups (an herbal alternative to milk in lattes and a unique cooking sauce) asked us to help them decide if it was the right time to go abroad. The teams identified things needed before the international moves.
Picture of the team presenting to Sakutea.Our students crossed functional boundaries to participate in case competitions. A team with two IBUS students won the local Boeing Case Competition. They came in second to UW in the finals.
Picture of the Boeing Team with Their Boeng AdvisorFaculty contribute in areas other than classroom teaching.
Ted Alden
Ted will publish his study When the World Closed its Doors: The Covid-19 Tragedy and the Future of Borders, in January 2025. His co-author is Laurie Trautman, who directs the Border Policy Research Institute at WWU.
Shih-Fen Chen
Growing up under an authoritarian regine, Shih-Fen deeply values the democratic achievement in Taiwan. During the recent national election, he returned to Taiwan to campaign for candidates committed to safeguarding the democracy of his homeland.
Skylar Powell
Skylar is working 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 is being collected in South Korea and the United States.
Shantala Samant
Shantala spent her winter term professional leave to do work on her research question, 'how are small and medium sized original equipment manufacturers in developing dountries achieving resilience and capability upgrading through times of re-globalzation. She is collecting data through interviews with OEM manufacturers in the automobile and construction equipment industries.
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.
We know that many of you are not in a position to make financial contributions at a given time. Remember that you can help is 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.
We thank many of you for supporting these initiatives on Give Day the past few years. Last year, more than thirty of you provided more than $10,000. For the third year, IBUS alumni contributions and participants were 'best of the rest', trailing only the much larger, established programs in Accounting, Economics, Marketing, and MSCM. Let's keep that position and improve the rankings in terms of the number of alumni contributing.
Thank you for considering supporting the International Business program. We look forward to face-to-face interaction as the crisis further recedes.
