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.

Last year, thirty-two alums have $12,000 to support the international study of current IBUS students. This allowed us to give all majors and minors $1000 stipends to support their study in the 2024-25 academic year. With increased 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

This year, we did some unusual projects in the IBUS 473 class. Following a lead from an alum who was in Peace Corps in China, we helped a local Chinese tea company find markets for its award-winning tea in the U.S. We had to overcome language problems and time differences, but now the firm has a tie to a Portland tea distributor. We worked to find markets for a Botswana tree fruit company in the Middle East. We looked for markets for a ‘first product’ of a bioplastics firm in Europe, a healthy dog chew that could even be safely ingested (FDA approved). And of course like almost every year in a decade, we found products for Costco via broker ADW Acosta.  Many local firms have been bought out, making many ‘traditional’ Whatcom firms no longer available as international passes to national or international headquarters. So if you know of projects, please let us know.

Picture of the team presenting to Sakutea.

We could not duplicate the pictured success in the Boeing competition from 2023 this last year due to the Boeing situation. We look forward to various case competitions this coming year. 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 Boeing Advisor

 

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.

 Shih-Fen Chen

Growing up under an authoritarian regime, 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 was collected in South Korea and the United States in May 2024, and the project has already resulted in three studies that are currently under review at peer reviewed journals.

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 countries 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. 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 om the research database. If you have not joined, send Professor Roehl a request to do so. We try to send this alumni list out to anyone we see on this LinkedIn group who posts a job loss or explicit interest in job change. Anyone can request the list from Professor Roehl (a general distribution is not allowed under WWU rules, unfortunately).

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.  

I hope we can call on you to help our fifteen 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 the current graduates focus their job search. If your firm, or someone in your network is hiring, I will be glad to post the opening to our Canvas sites for IBUS students.

We thank many of you for supporting these initiatives on Give Day the past few years. Last year we came in fourth, even beating one of the larger programs, Economics. We were the best of the smaller programs for the fourth year in a row in contributions.

Thank you for considering supporting the International Business program. We look forward to face-to-face interaction as the crisis further recedes.