By Heather Ma
If you ask venture capitalists what the essential element for a successful business is, 90% of them will tell you that “teamwork” is everything. There are many rules for forming a good team and having a good business. You can either find a guidebook from Amazon.com to gain some basic ideas, or plunge into a start-up and learn the tragic lessons yourself. Now here is one other option: learn it comprehensively with more gain and less pain through the Young Entrepreneurs of the Future (YEF), a business competition held by the Epoch Foundation (時代基金會) and MIT’s Sloan School. Though categorized as a business competition, I’d rather describe YEF as a process of learning. In different phases, you learn how to team up, work as a team, and deliver a confident presentation. Participants are forced to learn how to read and judge people in a short period of time. Besides finding the right people, using your resources to dig out the right information about your company is also crucial. I learned self-promotion and seven degrees of separation and became a believer in it! These abilities can’t be picked up overnight but only after weeks of tedious discussion and painful decision-making. But the gains are definitely worth the pain. I would recommend all DFLL students interested in business to give this event a try, and they will even be at an advantage when taking the English oral exam in the final stage of the competition. The winners get the chance to be in further sessions with CEOs and professors and even get a free trip to Silicon Valley and MIT! This trip is not a sightseeing tour, however. On the contrary, it offers you a whole new angle to the country. America is the world’s educator, having the best educational organizations (eight of the top ten universities in the world). It is also the world’s laboratory, having the leading labs and experimenters. Now you can have a chance to find out why. Entrepreneurship is deeply rooted in young minds in America. Back in 1938, a Stanford professor encouraged his students to start up their own companies. Two young fellows followed his advice and began to develop products in a garage in their backyard. This was the beginning of the Silicon Valley—and of Hewlett-Packard. Asians tend to think good grades mean good students; meanwhile, westerners highly regard individual values. We saw a student from the Harvard Business School not raking in money on Wall Street, but working in a restaurant as a waiter just so that someday he might realize his dream of running his own restaurants. We saw a student who quit school when he struck on a good business idea and is now one of the world’s richest men. Of course we also saw people reading while walking on Massachusetts Ave., and we firmly believed them to be typical MIT students. The more diverse the people, the more values they bring together. There is not only an open atmosphere, but also sound systems to support young people. In Taiwan, we still have a long way to go in terms of “entrepreneurial environment.” It’s not about winning or losing. The important thing is what you learn in each phase. It is about knowing that no one can succeed without teamwork, and that you have to devote yourself to the unfamiliar yet exciting field ahead of you. But don’t forget to make friends and support one another on the way to success! Remember to apply before the deadline in May each year. For further information refer to the following websites: http://www.epoch.org.tw/index.php http://www.entrepreneurship.net.tw/ or call (02) 2545-3525
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By Steffi Liu
I’m sure you’ve all heard of LASIK eye surgery. Reports and advertisements on it can now be seen everywhere: on TV, in magazines, and on the internet. These ads make it appear like it’s the greatest blessing nearsighted people are ever going to have, because they can get rid of their irritating glasses or contact lenses forever. But is the surgery really as amazing as they claim? While most of the information presented to us is positive, there still may be some aspects of the technology that remain unrevealed, information which the mass media and advertisements believe unnecessary for us to know. Therefore, I decided to get some information myself. I went to some clinics and interviewed people from medical schools. I found out that while many people expect the surgery to cure their visual deficiency, the basic theory of the surgery actually means more harm to the eye. By sculpting the cornea, the transparent covering in the front of the eye, the inappropriate curvature causing myopia is fixed, and the eye is then able to create images on the retina again. Nothing is done to the abnormal part of the eye, it is the originally normal part that is altered. Normal vision will return when the cornea has recovered from this “injury.” And will there be side effects? What we know so far is that this varies from person to person. Most people don’t have side effects at least in the first few years after their operations. But up to this point long-term research is still unavailable. Since the technology is still young, we can’t know what might happen in the future. Yet one thing I did learn is that the eyes might become weaker so that they need more protection or care; for example, long-haul flights should be avoided. Another thing people often wonder about is how good their eyesight will be after the surgery. Actually, no one knows. It depends on how well a person recovers from the surgery. Before the procedure there is an evaluation to see if you are an ideal candidate for the surgery, including your age and how bad your myopia is. Your post-surgery vision may also be estimated; usually they give you a range, say, 0.5-1.0. Since every case is different and not every operation will be equally successful, it’s not like you are guaranteed to get your normal vision back. But there is another problem. Most of the information that is presented to us in our daily lives may be biased, or even kept from us entirely, because the LASIK clinics want to encourage us to view their technology in a positive way, and to create in us a desire to buy it. Does wearing glasses really make you look so bad? Are glasses or contact lenses really so irritating that we must turn to LASIK surgery? Try to think about how advertising has shaped public knowledge, especially about this nascent medical technology, making us focus on the dark side of our lives and look to the surgery as a way to make us happy. By I-mei Ling
There I stood, with a pounding heart and sweaty palms. Before me, about thirty or forty students were talking and laughing as they stretched while waiting for the teacher to arrive. Some of them could bring their legs behind their necks; others could sit on the floor in a split, bend down, and touch their nose to the floor. Only years of dancing experience could have given them such flexibility. I couldn’t even do a split, so I hovered in the back of the room, trying to appear inconspicuous. Finally the teacher, a confident-looking African-American, strolled inside, and everyone was up and ready to start. I debated if I should slink out of the door. I was at Broadway Dance Center, New York City. As I was staying in Manhattan for the summer, I thought it might be interesting to sign up for a hip hop class. I enjoyed doing hip hop in Taiwan, and the dancing, as far as I knew, originated from the Bronx, New York. So I logged onto the Internet, found a dance studio that seemed pretty good (well-staffed, centrally-located, and not-so-expensive—for New York standards), and went to see what “da real thing” was like. At first all went well. Broadway Dance Center was easy to find, and the staff at the counter were super-friendly (putting to rest the stereotype that New Yorkers are cold and indifferent!). I chose a beginner’s class, since I had only danced about a year in Taiwan, and I was no fast learner. On my way to the classroom, I was thunderstruck to run into my hip hop teacher in Taiwan! We stared at each other as though the other was an alien, then broke into a stream of excited talk. I learned that she came here to improve her skills. My eyes nearly popped out; my teacher is awesome at dancing. She has danced for over thirty years, performed in numerous dance shows, and recently won a national competition. I couldn’t imagine that she would be here—as a student. Luckily we weren’t in the same class. I proceeded onto my classroom in a daze, because the thought of my teacher studying there had gotten on my nerves. I shouldn’t be here, I thought. The students must be light years ahead of me. And they were. The class began with a warm-up. We stretched our limbs to extraordinary limits. We did sit-ups for such a long time, I lost count after sixty. We did push-ups with one arm. By the time we finished, I was drenched with sweat and sore all over. Was this some kind of military camp? Then the teacher, Bev, started to teach us the choreography. To my relief, she didn’t tell us to start doing back flips in the air, but instead launched into a series of funky moves similar to the stuff you see on MTV. Still, I found it difficult, as Bev’s dancing style was quite different from what I’ve learned in Taiwan. A couple of times she even told us to jump and do a triple turn. In Taiwan, students were applauded if they could do a double turn, but here, a triple turn seemed a basic requirement. I struggled to keep up. Every time I forgot or failed to execute a move, I stole a glance at others to see if they were secretly laughing at me, as I was the worst student in the class. But no one did. Everyone was concentrating on the teacher, the mirrors, and themselves. Nobody was looking around to jeer at less competent students. And after going through the choreography a dozen times, I thought, what the hell. I just ignored the skills I couldn’t do and focused on those I could. Bev was full of energy, often shouting, “Just put your heart into it, baby!” or “Listen to the music! Feel it!” In the end, she turned off most of the lights and we danced one last time in semi-darkness. It was fantastic! After the class, I was totally worn out, but I was happy. Yes, I’m not an experienced dancer, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have fun. We’re dancing, not competing. And I’m glad the class was challenging, because that makes it all the more rewarding. And by the way, when I left the classroom, I noticed a piece of paper taped outside: Advanced Beginners. *For more information about Broadway Dance Center, log on to: http://www.bwydance.com/indexBway.shtml |
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May 2024
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