October is a hectic month at UNMC. Students face midterms, faculty have grading and grant applications, some staff are busy recruiting next year’s students. For a few faculty and administrators at UNMC, October means trips to China.
This series of three articles is about important elements of these trips. This first article is about recruitment. The following two articles, on education and connections with our partner institutions, will be posted later.
Recruiting students for UNMC’s programs is an important element of every trip to China. However, recruitment is a larger part of trips in October for a number of reasons.
One is timing. The deadlines for most applications for China Scholarship Council-supported graduate and health professions programs at UNMC are in December and January, and general international applications are due shortly after that. Potential applicants hearing about UNMC in October will have time to prepare; any later than that and they might not have time to complete their requirements.
Another is because the International Graduate School Fair, a large recruitment fair organized by the China Scholarship Council (CSC), is held in October. This year the fair was held in Beijing, Zhengzhou, Chengdu, and Hefei. Representatives from UNMC attended the fair at the first three locations.
UNMC has participated in CSC-organized recruitment fairs since 2008, when it was one of 14 universities. Now representatives from more than 100 universities from around the world attend the fair to recruit the best and the brightest students from China.
Zenghan "Hannah" Tong, Ph.D., assistant director of the Asia Pacific Rim Development Program, said, "competition for students’ attention at these fairs has really increased over the past few years. We’ve had to continually refine our message and means of connecting with them. However, our best means of recruitment at these fairs remains face-to-face interactions, so we’ve worked to increase traffic to our booth. This year we were able to review a list of students who registered ahead of time and contacted those who might be interested in our programs. We had almost 200 requests for more information during the fair, which is more than double what we received in 2015."
New this year was a joint recruitment effort between UNMC and the University of Nebraska Omaha. Representatives from both institutions participated in the fairs.
Dele Davies, M.D., vice chancellor for Academic Affairs, said "our booth was set up right beside UNO’s, so we could refer students who were interested in a non-biomedical major to them and they referred many to us who were interested in biomedical majors. This synergistic relationship was very helpful for both schools. Additionally, it was a good team building opportunity for UNMC and UNO."