The Official Establishment of NTUAA-NA on August 11th, 2012

NTUAA-NA (National Taiwan University Alumni Association of Northern America) has finally been officially established over the past years with much preparation and arrangement. And thus NTUAA-NA was born on August 11th, 2012. On the day of grand opening, many alumni representatives and chairmen of each alumni association around the Northern America and Taiwan joined the ceremony to witness the birth of NTUAA-NA along with NTU principal Si-Chen Lee and the vice principal Ming-Je Tang. As well, almost one hundred NTU graduates from New York, North California, San Diego, Texas and Taiwan joined this grand opening to celebrate this new historical record.

According to NTU principal Si-Chen Lee, the idea of founding the joint alumni association has been brought up from National Taiwan University Alumni Association of New York back in the year of 1993. Moreover, Lee has been promoting and working on the opportunity of the establishment of the joint alumni association, that is, NTUAA-NA, ever since his first principal year in 2005. However, it had not been really done over the past years. It was not until the recent years the NTU graduates began the discussion of establishing the joint alumni association. And consequently, with the efforts of the chairmen from each alumni association around Northern American and Taiwan, NTUAA-NA has finally been officially founded on August 11th, 2012.

Also, NTU principal Si-Chen Lee emphasized the fact that National Taiwan University has been ranked one of the top 100 universities in the world according to Times Higher Education Institute; hence, we should aim at proceeding to the top 50 by using the methods of organization to organization in hopes that National Taiwan University can achieve this goal with greater corporation around the world. So far, National Taiwan University has successfully reached many universities and corporations around the world for the ongoing projects with the international teamwork. These universities include UCLA, UCI, and many prestigious universities in France as well as the corporations as the followings: Intel Corporation and MD Anderson Cancer Center. The great connections and corporation from the organizations above made it possible that National Taiwan University can establish research centers for students to work on their scientific research with an improved academic environment. Furthermore, the new-founded sustainable fund helps National Taiwan University a lot so that we can promote the international corporation and thus carry out the scientific projects. It is anticipated and highly expected that more and more NTU graduates will be reciprocal and contribute more to NTU with the complete establishment and organization of NTUAA-NA.

By giving the speech to the grand opening of NTUAA-NA, vice NTU principal, Ming-Je Tang, pointed out that approximately there are 10 million NTU graduates now in North America, which is half of the total number of the 20 million NTU graduates. Therefore, National Taiwan University hopes to find out and welcome more NTU graduates in North America to join the NTUAA-NA for the greater contribution to NTU by taking advantages of the resources from this new joint alumni association, NTUAA-NA, once when it is officially founded. Due to this urgent need from NTU graduates’ aid, we need NTU graduates to provide all kinds of supports from all over the world. In the near future, National Taiwan University expects that each NTU graduate will be able to donate USD$1000 every year to help the university by giving the actual financial aid in order to be reciprocal to NTU, and thus we can proceed to the goal of being ranked as one of the top 50 universities in the world.

The first president of this joint alumni association, NTUAA-NA, Alan Hsu, recognized that the establishment of the NTU alumni association is absolutely the giant leap in the NTU history. NTUAA-NA can definitely unite all the other NTU alumni associations around the whole world and thus provide a better platform and greater access for the NTU graduates to communicate and to be reciprocate for the contribution to National Taiwan University. As well as the main purpose of being the platform and access, NTUAA-NA has also raised the donation from NTU graduates that we hope each graduate will be able to donate USD$100 every year to support National Taiwan University by giving the actual financial aid. In addition to that, NTUAA-SC (National Taiwan University Alumni Association of Southern California) also held the 39th anniversary ceremony on the same day as the grand opening in Taipei, Taiwan.