Xiaodong Wong and Bin Shen in the Netherlands
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¡°I found Miami from a blind search in Google,¡± was Bin Shen¡¯s answer to the question of how he came to choose Miami to continue his education in Business Accountancy. Five years later, Bin Shen, Master of Accountancy, 2003, along with his wife Xiaodong Wong, MBA in MIS, 2003, have established the Shanghai Chapter of the Miami University Alumni Association.
So far there are ten members, including both Chinese who studied at Miami and U.S Miamians who have made China their home. The membership is sure to grow in the near future as Chinese students hear about Miami through emissaries like Bin and Xiaodong, and U.S students enroll in new MU curricular offerings such as the China Business Program, the China Architecture Summer Workshop, and the GREAL Summer Language Institute in Tianjin which take them to China to pursue educational and career opportunities.
Xiaodong describes her first impression of Oxford as ¡°a town from a fairy story.¡± She remembers how different Oxford felt from Shanghai, ¡°The second morning on campus I took at ten minute walk from the Miami Manor to the MBA office and saw only a few other summer students. That could never happen in Shanghai, not even at 3:00 AM.¡±
For these two alumni from eastern China, their training and degrees from Miami have been ¡°priceless.¡± Only five years since graduation, Bin has become a Senior Consultant at IBM, Shanghai. Xiaodong is Senior Manager for Ingram Micro, the largest distributer of IT products in the world.
Xiaodong¡¯s favorite class in the MBA program was Statistics 501. Instead of simply memorizing formulas as she expected to do, she recorded bounce data with a team of classmates for five brands of tennis balls and analyzed the distributions. Most of the work was done outside on the Withrow tennis courts. Upon completing Miami¡¯s graduate program, she chose from four attractive offers and began her career at Ingram Micro.
Bin joked that he has ¡°changed jobs a lot.¡± Who can blame him, though, when in his latest move to IBM he was offered a forty percent pay increase. Right after graduating from Miami he started at the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC), then went to Accenture, and finally took his current position at IMB where he is Senior Consultant. At the moment he is managing the re-engineering and financial transformation of a Guangdong company called ¡°Agile Property Real Estate¡± (Yajuyue Dichan ÑžÓÀֵزú). He feels that his classes at Miami were lively and interactive, and that the numerous group projects provided valuable training. In Dr. Campbell¡¯s and Dr. Yen¡¯s classes students visited NCR and Proctor and Gamble facilities and observed real world applications of class concepts.
To the question, ¡°How does Miami seem different to you?¡± Xiaodong noted, ¡°New buildings and¡ more Chinese students.¡± With the new 210,000 square foot FSB Georgian Revival building slated for completion in September 2009, and applicants from China up 75 percent from last year, we can expect that trend to continue.
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