LU Moment Podcast #08: Study Abroad, Young Engineer of the Year, and Other Awards

Introduction (0:30)

Shelly Vitanza: You've tuned in to the LU Moment. I'm your host, Shelly Vitanza, the director of public affairs for Lamar University. We like to showcase great events, activities, programs, projects, and people at Lamar University just so you know everything that's going on there at Lamar and what a jewel Lamar University is to our community.

Shelly Vitanza: Today we're going to talk about Lamar University's Study Abroad Programs, specifically in the College of Business. I've got Dr. Henry Venta, who has been on every trip Lamar University offers, I believe, and he's going to correct me if I'm wrong, in the College of Business. Tough job, right? Yeah, yeah. He's got a real tough job. He gets to travel. He's going to give us all the details about that, but first, I want to talk about some other amazing people at Lamar, and this is just in this last week, some of the things that have happened, some of our Lamar University alumni and current students who have been recognized for doing outstanding things.

Awards and Achievements (1:27)

Shelly Vitanza: We have an electrical engineering senior, he's going to graduate later this year, who won first place at an IEEE paper contest, and his paper, doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but it has to do with microchips. The title was "Utilizing Spintronics via Logic and memory Processing for Low-Power and Embedded Computing." Amazing. He won the IEEE Region 5 East Area Student Paper Competition, which means he gets to go to the next level competition. It's really, really exciting. I want to mention his name is Josh Evans, Lamar University senior, electrical engineering. Pretty cool stuff.

Shelly Vitanza:  Then there's John Scott. He's a doctor, a graduate of Lamar University from 1979 with a bachelor of science in biology. He's been appointed to the Texas Physician Assistant Board by Texas Governor Greg Abbott. He will serve along with, I believe, five or six others on this board that is responsible for issuing physician-assisted licenses to qualified individuals here in the state of Texas, and he'll do that until the year 2023. So, another Lamar graduate doing amazing things. He did pre-med there, of course, at Lamar, and then went on to get his medical license.

Shelly Vitanza: And then we have a Lamar University alumnus named Young Engineer of the Year. The Texas Society of Professional Engineers, Sabine Chapter, named Keith Zotzky Young Engineer of the Year, and he was honored on February 21st by this group during a banquet. Zotzky graduated in 2011, and he is a staff engineer for Arceneaux Wilson & Cole. He's a civil engineer, and that's a firm located in Port Arthur. He's responsible for drainage designs, land development, water and sewer design, as well as pipeline design, and he was nominated not only because of his professional achievements, but also because of his involvement in the engineering profession and, of course, the society there that he's very active. I think he's the treasurer currently and has been the secretary in the past.

Study Abroad with the College of Business (3:48)

Shelly Vitanza: Congratulations to all these folks for being recognized for their hard work. It goes to show what you can do with a degree from Lamar University. Lots of opportunity, lots of recognition in the community and beyond. So, wanted to point that out. Lots of great people coming from Lamar University, including Dr. Henry Venta, who was the dean of the College of Business for how many years?

Dr. Henry Venta: 16 years, until last July.

Shelly Vitanza:  Until last July, and then you just decided you'd rather travel?

Dr. Henry Venta: I have been involved with every program of Study Abroad, but-

Shelly Vitanza: Oh, I didn't lie.

Dr. Henry Venta: I've only taken one group away. The other times I was the dean, of course, and so was very responsible for finding funding, the program design, who gets to go, but actually I've only been with a student group this last time. In the first two weeks of January I took a group to the south of Spain to study business in the European Union, and that's the one that I can talk from personal experience, but of course I know all the other programs.

Shelly Vitanza: You know all the other programs, so let me get this straight. I think what I'm hearing you say is you helped develop the program from the get-go as dean.

Dr. Henry Venta: Right, so when I first started as dean, we didn't really have any programs from the College of Business Study Abroad.

Shelly Vitanza: Really?

Dr. Henry Venta: In fact, Study Abroad at Lamar University has taken great leaps over the last decade or so.

Shelly Vitanza: Overall, in the whole campus?

Dr. Henry Venta: Overall, that's correct.

Shelly Vitanza: Why is that? Why is Study Abroad so important?

Dr. Henry Venta: Because these days, you don't compete just with the people from this area and from Houston and Austin, you compete from that guy in Japan that puts in his resume in Indeed, right?

Shelly Vitanza:  That's right.

Dr. Henry Venta: So you need to have global connections, global experiences. You need a variety of things. Lamar University has been very active in that, particularly since the beginning of Ken Evans's presidency. He's put a lot of effort, and of course money. One of the things about Study Abroad is that it costs money.

Shelly Vitanza:  It's costly to travel.

Dr. Henry Venta: So although the coursework itself is not the issue, because often that's just a regular course and however a student pays for courses normally, financial aid, scholarships, all that can cover Study Abroad courses, but the actual trip itself and the maintenance and the airfare and all that, that is an additional cost and the demographic of our student body is that most of them can't afford that directly without some scholarship help.

Shelly Vitanza: And so a lot of scholarship money goes toward this, because the university believes it's important.

Dr. Henry Venta: That's correct. Dr. Evans has done a lot at the university level. At the college level, we were one of the pioneers in the university as a college in beginning these programs.

Shelly Vitanza: The Business College?

Dr. Henry Venta: Correct. We were able, because of the wonderful generosity of several donors, to create some large funds that allow us to provide scholarship opportunity to lots of students, and so that is ... It's a lot easier for a student to consider this when they-

Shelly Vitanza: -know that there's funds that they can-

Dr. Henry Venta: -that there's funds they can-

Shelly Vitanza: Yeah.

Dr. Henry Venta: That's correct. They can cover some of their-

Shelly Vitanza: Access, right.

Dr. Henry Venta: -some of their access. Between 50 and 70%, somewhere there-

Shelly Vitanza: Oh, that's great.

Dr. Henry Venta: -we try to cover. We began ... I can't even remember now the year, but maybe seven or eight years ago.

Shelly Vitanza: Somewhere in your 16-year tenure there, yeah.

Dr. Henry Venta: Yeah, but not early. Later, because it takes funding, and until you can get that funding, and getting that funding means developing the donor network and all that. The first program that we did was a program to China, and that program has been ongoing since that time.

Shelly Vitanza: Really?

Dr. Henry Venta: We do that program in the time period between the end of the spring semester and the beginning of the summer sessions, so students can actually go-

Shelly Vitanza: Couple of weeks?

Dr. Henry Venta: Couple weeks. Couple of weeks. Let me backtrack here. All of our programs except for one are short-term programs.

Shelly Vitanza: Got it.

Dr. Henry Venta: Between 10 days and 15 days. That's because most of our student body works, needs to continue to go to school all the time, so the concept of the traditional study abroad of, "Let's go away for a semester or a year," just-

Shelly Vitanza: Not practical for our people.

Dr. Henry Venta: -just doesn't work for the business students in particular.

Shelly Vitanza: Got it.

Dr. Henry Venta: Neither the undergrad, and particularly not for the grad students.

Shelly Vitanza: Sure.

Dr. Henry Venta: So all of our programs essentially have been these kinds of smaller programs, but two weeks is better than no weeks, I'll say that.

Shelly Vitanza: Absolutely.

Dr. Henry Venta: Also, the experience in how we schedule that, they're completely, completely full. It's not like you're going to another school, you're enrolling some other classes, and then you achieve the cultural immersion by osmosis, by being there. No. We just have everything super structured and the students are going from one place to the next, and so we pack a lot in a couple of weeks.

Shelly Vitanza: This is not vacay?

Dr. Henry Venta: No, it is not at all. It is not at all.

Shelly Vitanza: This is get it and go and you're totally immersed in the culture. I'm assuming, because it's business, you tour businesses.

Dr. Henry Venta: Yes, right. Let me give you an itinerary for the last trip that we went to.

Shelly Vitanza: Perfect.

Dr. Henry Venta: The latest trip that we've created ... Because my replacement, Dan French, who's the dean of the College of Business, has longtime connections with a university in the south of Spain called the University of Alicante. Alicante is in what is called the Valencia community. Communities are like states, and Alicante province is like a county, maybe, in our system, so we went to Alicante and did lots of things, but always coming back to sleep in Alicante, so the students were not burdened by traveling from place to place. Now, that means we covered a smaller region. If you go to China, you can't really do that.

Shelly Vitanza: You've got to cover a lot of territory.

Dr. Henry Venta: Exactly, exactly. So every day, we had side visits where we went to see different companies, we had sometimes longer field trips, we went to several other cities, we had class every day.

Shelly Vitanza: Really?

Dr. Henry Venta: Because we were at a university we had classroom space, and so half the classes were done by professors at the University of Alicante, so for example, we had professors talk about doing marketing in the European Union, how you manage the international affairs in the European Union.

Shelly Vitanza: Very relevant.

Dr. Henry Venta: Absolutely.

Shelly Vitanza: Because we're marketing over there. Our companies are marketing to the European Union.

Dr. Henry Venta: Exactly. We got some discussions on the new data regulations in the European Union that are affecting all of us. All of our listeners can attest that they now go into any web site and at the bottom it says all this stuff about, "We use cookies and we do this," and you have to accept it.

Shelly Vitanza: That's it. That's it.

Dr. Henry Venta: That's a result of the European Union's new rules on data, so they affect you every day even though you don't know that. We visited the European Union Intellectual Property Office. That was a magnificent time that we had there. Then, of course, cultural activities, right?

Shelly Vitanza:  Sure.

Dr. Henry Venta: We did lots of cultural activities. The students spent, between visits and classroom time and side trips that are business-oriented, probably about 45 contact hours during the two-week period, which is the same as you would spend if you went to class in a whole semester in a course.

Shelly Vitanza: That's incredible.

Dr. Henry Venta: In addition to that, of course, we had the cultural things. So we go visit a city, we go see these castles, we do all this stuff, because I am fluent in Spanish and have been to Spain many times. Then they got the cultural activity from me in some sense. We would go out to dinner all together, and they'd get an experience of, "What is it to eat tapas? Everybody knows here about tapas, but what really is it and how does it work?"

Shelly Vitanza: Is it different?

Dr. Henry Venta: It's quite different. Quite different than-

Shelly Vitanza: Quite different, I would assume. Yeah, it's been Americanized, right?

Dr. Henry Venta: In Spain, they don't eat like we do. They have five meals a day, they're just smaller.

Shelly Vitanza: I could live there. Yes.

Dr. Henry Venta: Yes, absolutely. Anyway, that gives you an experience. We flew together, came back together.

Shelly Vitanza: Do the students stay in a hotel? What are their living conditions, and how many go?

Dr. Henry Venta: Yeah. This group that I had had 12 students. Half of them were undergraduate students and half of them were graduate students, so the age range was 19 to 42.

Shelly Vitanza: Wow.

Dr. Henry Venta: And yet we jelled well, we did lots of things, they wrote a lot of reports. They're now, after they've come back ... In fact, today, their report is due. Each of them was put in a group, and one of the things they learned over there was a model ... Understanding the impact of tourism, and they're doing that for three different regions in our area, the Golden Triangle, the Galveston/Bolivar area, and the whole Texas Gulf Coast region.

Shelly Vitanza: They're putting together reports about the impact of travel in those areas?

Dr. Henry Venta: That's correct. Right, impact of tourism, yes.

Shelly Vitanza: Tourism.

Dr. Henry Venta: It's very exciting. I've already received the report. The quality is quite high. The students get a terrific experience. They do so at a modest out-of-pocket expense because of the scholarship opportunities.

Shelly Vitanza:  And gain practical information.

Dr. Henry Venta: Absolutely.

Shelly Vitanza:  And they're coming back and implementing what they learned almost immediately.

Dr. Henry Venta: Absolutely. If you had dinner or lunch with them before they went on a trip and after they come on a trip, you can just tell. They're different people.

Shelly Vitanza: Do they gain credit for this?

Dr. Henry Venta: Yes. They take a course and the courses vary in name, but they're generally courses associated with global enrichment or special topics in management, things of that sort.

Shelly Vitanza: I can assume, from what we've talked about the demographic of our students there at Lamar University, some of these folks maybe haven't flown, they haven't been very far out of the area. That, in and of itself, has got to be a good educational experience.

Dr. Henry Venta: That's right. Only one student of the 12 that I took had ever been abroad.

Shelly Vitanza: Right, right.

Dr. Henry Venta: Had ever been abroad. I'm not counting Canada.

Shelly Vitanza: Just getting passports and going through that, those are practical skills that you have to ... Packing for a long trip, these are practical life skills, important life skills.

Dr. Henry Venta: That's right, and believe it or not, they were instructed, "Don't pack-"

Shelly Vitanza: -"a whole lot."

Dr. Henry Venta: "Carry-on only."

Shelly Vitanza: Wow.

Dr. Henry Venta: You have to be able to do it, because otherwise you miss your connection.

Shelly Vitanza: You're going to be hauling that around and you'll be miserable.

Dr. Henry Venta: And you miss your connection, right?

Shelly Vitanza: Right, right. Been there and done that, yeah.

Dr. Henry Venta: On the way back they can check anything they want to, but on the way there they were instructed too that they had to understand security risks, they had to do ... It's a wonderful sort of experience.

Shelly Vitanza: It sounds just wonderful.

Dr. Henry Venta: The Spain trip was the first time we did it was in January. It will be done again this summer. I'm not leading that group. Another professor's leading the group this summer. We have been doing in the past the one to China that I mentioned at the beginning of the broadcast, and that's a different kind of trip because you have to travel so much. They take planes from one city to the next. They of course always visit Beijing, which is the cultural center, but we visit lots of the business cities in Spain, and they go again visit factories, they visit companies, and all that. Often they go to Hong Kong to understand the contrast between mainland China and Hong Kong and how things work. Very interesting to them.

Dr. Henry Venta: We also do a trip, that in fact they are leaving on Saturday, March 9th, to Panama and Costa Rica. They spend the first half of the trip in Costa Rica. The students stay with host families, so they have to get immersed immediately in what that culture is.

Shelly Vitanza: Staying with a host family, I can only imagine.

Dr. Henry Venta: That's correct, yes. Then in Costa Rica, we spend a lot of time on ecotourism and activities like that because that's what Costa Rica's famous for. Then we hop across to Panama, and in Panama, Panama's a completely different place, full of international trade, big banking, and of course the Panama Canal. We were lucky that a Lamar alum, Jorge Quijano, I think he's just finished his term as director of the Panama Canal Authority, and so we get some nice VIP treatment at the Panama Canal.

Shelly Vitanza: I bet. That's wonderful.

Dr. Henry Venta: We get inside tours, not just the tours that any tourist can get, and so we get a variety of those things. We visit a variety of things.

Shelly Vitanza:  A nice benefit.

Dr. Henry Venta: Dean French also has some contacts with the City of Knowledge and a variety of other areas where the students will have a broad range of experience. Again, that trip leaves on a Saturday, returns the following week on a Sunday, so nine days, but of course they work before they go to the trip and they work after they go to the trip.

Shelly Vitanza: A lifetime of knowledge while they're there.

Dr. Henry Venta: Absolutely. We pack it. We pack it heavily.

Shelly Vitanza: Okay, so Spain, China, Costa Rica-

Dr. Henry Venta: Costa Rica and Panama.

Shelly Vitanza: And Panama.

Dr. Henry Venta:  That's the only ones that we do so far that are those short-term ones.

Shelly Vitanza: Got it.

Dr. Henry Venta: We also have a long-running exchange program with the ESC Rennes School of Business, which is two hours outside of Paris in France. That's more traditional semester exchanges. Their students come here, our students go there.

Shelly Vitanza: Have we done a lot of that?

Dr. Henry Venta: I'd say over the years, we've probably done ... 20 students from Lamar have gone there. Usually every semester we have two or three people there and we have three or four people from them come over here.

Shelly Vitanza: Great experience. The students come back and are just-

Dr. Henry Venta: And it's both ways. Right now, for example, in one of the classes I'm teaching I have two exchange students, and so they add significant value to the class. They bring a perspective that is so different. So even the students that aren't going on Study Abroad benefit when we have students from abroad come be in their classes.

Shelly Vitanza: Now, Dr. Venta, I didn't mention it and I'm sorry. You're a professor of management in our Department of Management and Marketing there. Still involved in the College of Business and of course doing the Study Abroad. What do the students have to do to qualify to go on one of these programs?

Dr. Henry Venta: They have to be in good standing and generally, of course, the better you are academically, the more likely that you can get some funding.

Shelly Vitanza: To be chosen and get funding, yeah.

Dr. Henry Venta: For the funding, it depends on what the status is and what they're doing. Primary funding is for College of Business students going on College of Business-sponsored trips.

Shelly Vitanza: Got it.

Dr. Henry Venta: The France trip, for example, is College of Business students, but that's not exactly a College of Business-sponsored trip so that's slightly second priority. Anybody in the university can qualify, so if a student is not a business student but wants to go on a business trip, they qualify, they're just at a lower priority and so it depends upon availability of funds.

Shelly Vitanza: How many people are going and that kind of thing.

Dr. Henry Venta: Right.

Shelly Vitanza: I would bet that it's very desired, that there are a lot of people who want to do this.

Dr. Henry Venta: It is. A lot of our students are scared.

Shelly Vitanza: Sure.

Dr. Henry Venta: You know our demographic of our students. Many of them have never left Texas. Many of them haven't left this side of the state. So the idea of going abroad, it's scary for some of them, so they have to be-

Shelly Vitanza: Really out of their comfort zone, yeah.

Dr. Henry Venta: Right, so they have to be pushed a little bit. The more we can have situations like this radio broadcast that informs students about, "This is good. We should try it and it's all right to step into the unknown a little bit"-

Shelly Vitanza:  People come back, and they-

Dr. Henry Venta: That's right. That's right.

Shelly Vitanza: -they go back to school.

Dr. Henry Venta: That's the most important rule of Study Abroad.

Shelly Vitanza: Come home.

Dr. Henry Venta: Right. Everybody you took has to come back.

Shelly Vitanza: That's right. That's right. I think it's exciting, and I applaud you for being one of the pioneers there at Lamar to get this going, because it's changing students' lives and their perspective and making them more valuable in the workforce, and that's important, and that's what Lamar's all about. We're really building the next generation of workforce.

Dr. Henry Venta:  We have to be competitive globally for our students, and our students need to be exposed to the global economy that we all live in. As you go down the line in the future, the pie, the economic pie is growing. Our share of the economic pie, as Americans, is probably diminishing.

Shelly Vitanza: Getting smaller.

Dr. Henry Venta: But a smaller share of a bigger pie ends up with more, and so our students and in fact the whole community needs to understand that-

Shelly Vitanza: The pie's getting bigger.

Dr. Henry Venta: Right, and that the good old days are probably gone forever, and they weren't maybe as good as you thought they were, and that-

Shelly Vitanza: But it can still be good.

Dr. Henry Venta: Absolutely. Being a participant in the new global order is of primary importance.

Shelly Vitanza: Yeah, you can't put your head in the sand.

Dr. Henry Venta: That's right.

Shelly Vitanza: Thank you so much. Great information, and I really had no idea that all of that was going on at Lamar. I'm glad to know and I hope people out there appreciate the information too, and I hope there's a student listening out there, a current student or a future student who would be interested in the College of Business and going to one of these programs. Thank you so much.

Dr. Henry Venta: If we have some donors that are out there-

Shelly Vitanza: Of course.

Dr. Henry Venta: -we can always use more money. Thank you very much for having me.

Shelly Vitanza: I love it. More money, too. All right, let me tell you a few things going on this week. The History in Motion, Julius Caesar is a film that's being showed on March 19th. We've got a lot of baseball and softball, and I want to let teachers out there know that we're bringing in guest lecturer Michael Fullan. He is really internationally known for his development of ... He's a worldwide authority on educational reform and he advises policymakers and local leaders in helping to achieve the moral purpose of all learning. He is coming to speak at our Ballroom, the Setzer Center Ballroom, on March the 20th at 11:30 and all educators in our area are invited to attend. Wanted to let everybody know about that.

Shelly Vitanza: Hey, thanks for spending this time with us and listening to the LU Moment. We really do appreciate it. I'm Shelly Vitanza, your host, and we'll see you next week.