The CTCI Foundation 2016 Enterprise Visit was an extremely well-executed trip for graduate students. The most influential part was the introduction to the Invest Taiwan Service Center on the first day. I appreciated the clarification of the points system now included in the process for obtaining a work permit and that for entrepreneur visas for those of us with interest in running a business in Taiwan. All the information provided was pertinent that I shared it with my friends and foreign colleagues here. Although the staff of ITSC prepared to meet with us, there were a few questions that may not have been satisfactorily answered due to miscommunication or just plainly lost in translation. But this is often unavoidable when translating two challenging languages. All in all, the assistance is given to us by ITSC is immeasurable. The various enterprises warmly welcomed the graduate students and displayed impressive introductions to their companies and the work they currently produce. Opening the floor to students for questions was a wonderful opportunity to better understand the work environments at each enterprise even though the students, including myself, were too shy to confer. I would like to suggest possibly broadening the company categories as this enterprise visit mainly pertained to persons within the electrical or mechanical engineering or marketing fields. Although these may be the most common fields that foreigners in Taiwan are affiliated with or accepted into, a couple of the more uncommon areas where Taiwan may need to expand could also be considered, such as, environmental engineering, medicine, textiles, food science/industry (though this was somewhat covered by the Taiwan Hon Chuan Group). I also thoroughly enjoyed the visits to some of the touristic sites in Taizhong and Miaoli. These stops provided a great refresher in between enterprise visits and gave the students time to interact with each other and form a network across the various universities we attend. With new friends, we may build bridges for future co-operations. I hope that the CTCI Foundation Enterprise Visit will be an annual venture for years to come so that more graduate students will be encouraged to remain in Taiwan and positively contribute to its development and society.
