As one of a few comprehensive universities owning a college of medicine in Taiwan, ISU has established colleges in different domains, including medicine, science, engineering, technology, business administration, humanities, and social sciences, attracting around 1,500 international students from over 40 countries and making its campus a miniature of the United Nations. With an abundance of international and interdisciplinary learning resources, ISU not only dedicates itself to highlighting features of each department, building a bilingual campus, and improving students’ foreign language skills but also establishes the Metaverse Center for Technology, Arts, and Design, the AI Innovation Center, the New Media Learning and Creation Center, the Smart Mechanical Workshop, and the Intelligent Medical Teaching Center, to nurture future IT talent equipped with interdisciplinary skills.
Dr. Hsiang-Chen Hsu, the Director of the Headquarters for Industry-University Collaboration and Intellectual Property Management, said that national development began with talent cultivation. In addition to assisting students in broadening their professional knowledge, the industry-university collaboration also helps nurture talent that meets industry demands and expectations, creating a win-win-win situation in advanced talent training programs for universities, students, and industries. In each department, an “industry-university community” is established to encourage faculty members to actively link external resources and businesses with the characteristics and expertise of their departments to achieve substantive collaboration, jointly facilitate the career development of students, and strive for employment and internship opportunities for students, making industry-university partnership seamless.
ISU is strengthening its industrial research and development and international connections, as well as deepening collaboration with iconic domestic enterprises. Riding on the development trend of Kaohsiung as a semiconductor hub in the technology industry, many well-known large enterprises, such as TSMC, ASE, UMC, FLEXium, and affiliates under E United Groups, have entered the ISU campus to recruit talent. As a result, ISU has become a national talent cultivation base for the hi-tech industry.
To enhance students’ practical industry experience, ISU partnered with Advanced Wireless Semiconductor Company, an optoelectronic semiconductor gallium arsenide plant at the Southern Taiwan Science Park, to establish a master’s degree cultivation program. The program guarantees generous scholarships for master’s students from departments including electronics, electrical engineering, materials, and chemical engineering, during their studies and internships. It also guarantees employment upon graduation. In terms of practical talent training under the Ministry of Education’s Industry College Program, ISU has collaborated with ASE to create an end-to-end education-to-workplace pathway, including professional technical education and factory internship training to quickly acquire workplace knowledge and skills, enabling students to possess solid professional and technological literacy before graduation. Moreover, ISU has also collaborated with the German company ZNT for industry-university collaboration. ZNT has donated advanced innovative manufacturing system software, allowing students to interface with industries directly during their coursework and become familiar with the working environment immediately after graduation.
To ensure that its students can seamlessly transition to the workforce and contribute to society with their acquired knowledge, ISU utilizes the strength of higher education, from talent development to industry collaboration. This allows every ISU student to stay ahead of the industrial development trend and cultivate knowledge and competitiveness that can be carried forward.
