2010 NTU Azalea Festival to Debut in March

With the arrival of Spring, the azaleas in NTU campus are in full bloom!! The annual grand event—the "NTU Azalea Festival" will also be in full swing in March. The activities shall include the departmental fair, the student associations fair, guided tours, literary and art events, homecoming events and student performances. Faculty, students, and parents from high schools are welcome to attend the Festival, as well as NTU alumni and Taipei city residents. Do not miss this rare opportunity to watch the beautiful azaleas blossoming in Spring!

At 9:30 a.m. on March 13th, by the plaza in front of the NTU Sports Center, President Si-Chen Lee will officiate the opening ceremony for the Azalea Festival. The departmental fair and the student associations fair will also kick off, amidst performances by the NTU Choir, the International Ballroom Dancing Society, and children from the NTU Affiliated Elementary School. All sectors of society are welcome to attend the opening ceremonies.

The departmental fair and student associations fair are the highlights of the NTU Azalea Festival, for this year they will be held from March 13th to March 14th. Commenced in 1997, the Azalea Festival now enters its 14th year, and every year it attracted tens of thousands of students and parents from the high schools in the middle and Southern part of Taiwan to come to visit. The 54 departments that participate in this year's departmental fair will hold showcase exhibitions on the first and third floor of the Sports Center (the Taida Little Arena), where the curricula, the faculty and future developments of each department will be fully demonstrated and explained, providing direct information to NTU visitors. The student associations' fair will be staged around the perimeters of the Taida Little Arena and along the adjacent roads, in which over 100 student associations will participate, launching a series of exciting performances and activities, and showing the diversified and vivacious side of the extra-curricular activities of NTU students.

As the best university in Taiwan, the National Taiwan University's alumni have achieved glorious results in the field of literary creations. In order to celebrate the 2010 NTU Azalea Festival, the NTU Center for Art Promotion specifically launches the "Azalea Poem Festival" , whose activities include poem and manuscript exhibitions of poets who are NTU alumni, inviting poets who are NTU alumni to provide their manuscripts, so that readers can see the handwriting of poets and get closer to the poets' minds. At the first floor of the main library a "Five Elements Hyperlink Poems and Cross-boundary Art Creations" exhibition will be held, which invite poets to write poems centered around the concept of "five elements" and through the use of multi-media materials. In the evening of March 18th is the "NTU Poets' Night", to which many poets will be invited to chant his own works and to share his creative experience with the audience. In the evening of March 26th is the "Dance with the Azaleas" party, which will feature well known poets reciting their own works, and expressions of modern poetry through music, dance, and multi-media. In addition, there will be lunchtime musical concerts with poem recitations, and color ceramics creative workshops.

When the azaleas are in bloom, the alumni return. For this year's azalea festival, NTU planned a series of activities for its alumni, including the Alumni Karaoke Contest (where the alumni ID can be applied on site), campus guided tours, gallery of university history guided tours, alumni relating old tales and time-tunnel exhibition of old photographs. From March 13th to March 14th, all alumni are welcome to return to their alma mater with their classmates to participate in alumni-dedicated activities. The Alumni Karaoke Contest is the main focus of the alumni exclusive activities, which will be held in the morning of March 13th in the Sports Center. NTU alumnus can sing solo, with up to five members as chorus (not confined to NTU alumni), and the judges include celebrated professionals such as Hsiao-Wen Ting and Hai-Ling Wang. Every participant gets to win a souvenir, plus there will be excellent prize money for the top singers.

The development of the internet and the cell phone shortens the distance among people, and expands human life from physical space to virtual space. Quintessentially, the internet and the cell phone are changing people's mode of living and work, even their entertainment, leisure , and social life. Starting from March 11th, the College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science holds a special exhibition entitled "Internet, cell phone, and me" in the Gallery of University History, in which various ways will be utilized to present the new and interesting applications of the internet and cell phone, and how these two can be integrated to affect the communication, work, and living between you and me.

Ever since its inception, the NTU Azalea Festival provides the most direct information for visitors. Students and their parents can appreciate that NTU is a university endowed with both humanities and sciences through participation in the Azalea Festival. We would like to wish the high school students that their dreams will come true, that they not only visit NTU during the Festival, but will one day become a NTU student studying in the department of their desire, and listen to the chime of the Fu Bells like all NTU community members. Remember, NTU is for pursuance of excellence for a better future!! For information concerning the Azalea Festival, please log onto its proper website or call: (02) 3366-2042.