MIM Life Series: Portland and MIM Classmates

By Yuanqian Sun

I want to say, I love all of our MIM members! They are like my family right now. We are working together and learning together almost everyday. Here are some memorable moment I personal took during the term.

1. Portland, Oregon
2. Portland State University
3. Chinese group in Japanese class
4. Classmate’s wedding reception
5. Have Chinese traditional dim sum with my friends

First of all, I want to say, I love Oregon, I love Portland. This is the place I have lived for already five years but I am still liking it.

Mount Hood is the best place we can go outside with our classmates. I came with my classmates on the weekend and it was so beautiful. We can climb or drive to the mountain top.

Then, I want to say, Portland is the beautiful city that I like the most in United States. I have been to a lot of states and a lot of cities, none of them makes me feel like home. Portland people are so nice, they always smile to you even if they don’t know you. Also, the weather is so nice in the summer. I like it.

I like my classmates in Portland State University MIM program. Although we are Chinese, we didn’t know each other before we came to MIM. I would like to say, MIM gave us the opportunities to let us meet and know each other. I am very happy to know them and be their friends.

This is the picture we took in Japanese class. it’s so fun that MIM program provided us a chance to learn a different culture and a second language. The Chinese students were learning Japanese in the past year. We were not only learning Japanese, but also the culture.

This is the picture at Derek’s wedding party. He was the second MIM member to get married in our program, and the first one who held a wedding during our school year. We all came to celebrate. This makes us just like a family. All of the MIIMers are like sisters and brothers. We are all very happy that he can find his love.

After class, we would have lunch or dinner together. This is the picture we have Chinese traditional dim sum in HK Café. They are my Thai friends. They are all very nice. They were learning Chinese for a year and they really like Chinese culture. When we have dim sum, they try to use their Chinese to made the order.

MIM Life Series: Internships and Future Career for MIM International Students

By Linda Quach

My name is Linda Quach and I come from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. In this blog, I am going to share my personal story in how I ended up choosing MIM for my graduate degree, what am I doing right now and what my plan is after graduation in terms of being an international student.

Linda with Ma Weihua, a famous Chinese calligrapher during the China-Oregon conference. She received a scholarship from PSU Confucius Institute of which Master Ma is one of the donors.

I was born in  family with a strong business background, so I was always fascinated to learn about the business world since I was very little. I had a chance to come to the United States to study, and I earned my Bachelor’s Degree in Business Management in 2013 from Oregon State University. My initial plan was to go home right after I graduated and start looking for jobs in Vietnam. However, we can always change the plan. My interests in supply chain motivated me to go further, and I chose MIM because it is a perfect combination of international management, a specialization in supply chain, and Chinese. The Dean of Business School in my previous university recommended me to PSU, and I am very happy about the choice that I made.

I am now doing an internship for a web design and software provider company located in Downtown Portland. Honestly, it was hard for an international student to find internships/jobs and get hired. However, I think if we are willing to commit putting time and efforts, we could get it. I spent almost two months looking for an internship. I went to PSU career services website everyday, attended networking events, joined the mentor program, career roundtables, and the career fair. I know we hear these all the time, and they don’t work for some people. Rather than directly being offered a job, I think we go to those events to make connections, get to know more people, build relationships, ask for advice. The most important thing from these events is keeping in touch later on with the new connections that we made during the events. If we go home and do nothing, we will get nothing. Those are pieces of my advice and I hope they help. As graduation is getting close, I hope everyone in my cohort will come out as a strong candidates for the jobs they want to do.

My plan after graduation is to take a short break to travel and then find jobs in the United States, especially Portland. I’d love to run my own business later on, and it would be exciting if I can have my fellow MIM-ers as partners. We all go find jobs and work for others, but why don’t we get together and work for ourselves.

MIM Life Series: Peak into the Life of an MIM student

By Suresh Kumar

Life in the MIM program is hard. It is hard because there is barely any time do anything other than studying, that is if you want to learn a lot and earn good grades in the process. We are in school for most of the day. Our classes start at 8:45 in the morning and end at 5 ‘O clock in the evening. Yes, there is a couple of hours of break, but should we use that break to study? Or should we use that break to eat and socialize with the other members of the MIM program? When we get out from class at 5, do we go home and relax or should we stay at school and complete our homework? I would like to tell you how I have approached this dilemma for the past terms that I have been a member of this program. Since, I had a girl friend at the beginning of the program, I would spend the couple hours of break with her and sometimes with my fellow MIM friends. About 95% of the time, I stayed in school to complete my homework after the 5 O’ clock class because my productivity goes up if I am studying in the library. I just cannot concentrate at home. Even when I went straight from class to the library, it would take me 4 to 5 hours to complete my homework, meaning I wouldn’t get home till 10 or 11. This was and is frustrating to my parents as they do not believe that I stay in school to do homework. I don’t know what they think I do, but certainly studying at school is not in their frame of reference. I do not even have time to eat as if I stop to take a break and eat, that takes away at least 30 minutes from completing my homework. Thus, I stay at school and complete my homework before eating anything. On the days that I decided to go home, it was almost always that I did not go to bed before 2 am in the morning. I remember during the first two to three terms, I went to bed around 2 am almost every night. One thing to note is that I work 14 hours a week while going to school full time. I would advice working more than 10 hours in this program as this program takes a lot out of you- physically, mentally and emotionally. It is important to note that I work slower than a regular graduate student. If a task takes me an hour to complete, it would probably take another graduate student 30-40 minutes. However, different have gone through the same experience as me.

Talking about maintaining a good work life balance, I was in school for 5 days a week and I would only go home to sleep. There would be nights when I would only see my dad and brother while they were already asleep. By the time I would wake up, they would have already gone to work and school. Additionally, there was also times when I would see my best friend only once or twice every two weeks. During the initial stages of the program, our director said that if you like working out, then forget about working out. Your life will be about studying now, you will not have time to work out. And he was not lying. I used to work out and play sports for about 2-3 hours each day, and now it would be a miracle if I could work out 2-3 hours a week. This can speak for the demand of this program.

Nonetheless, this program isn’t jus negatives as it may have sounded like. The above paragraphs are just to indicate the rigor and challenges of being in this program. This program will help you become very successful in the future due to the services being provided, the professors as well as other personnel such as Jodi Nelson and DeAnne Preston. This program is designed in a way that would lead you to becoming a successful individual if you follow each step in the process. “MIM Professional Passport” is one example which pushes us out of our comfort zone and enables us to make connections which is invaluable in attaining jobs in the US as well as abroad. The MIM program is also very similar to the MBA programs; the only difference is that this program teaches you the cultural aspect as well, such as how to interact with people from different cultures, why people act the way they do etc. So, you are learning the best of both worlds. And most importantly, you will make friends that you will keep in touch for the rest of your life. You literally spend more time with your cohort than your family, thus the bonds and relationships you create here will last a long time.

Life in the MIM program is hard, but will be an experience of a life time.