Graduate students with degrees in Chinese from the East Asian languages and civilizations department at the University of Colorado at Boulder are getting positions at prestigious universities all over the nation -- a notable accomplishment for a small and relatively new humanities program.
"The word is out that our program trains people very well and we are gaining recognition nationwide," said Paul W. Kroll, director of graduate studies in Chinese.
"We are competing against programs that have been around for 60 to 70 years, yet students who have graduated with this Ph.D., or who are currently in the final stages of writing their dissertations, have been extraordinarily successful in finding jobs at major institutions."
The program's first three doctoral graduates have faculty positions at Swarthmore College, Ohio State University and the University of Oregon. Two students who are nearing completion of their dissertations are now teaching at Stanford and a third has just been hired by the University of Michigan.
Graduates who have taken the master's as a terminal degree have landed successful positions as well. Some have taught at the Air Force Academy and at high schools around the state. One is working for the National Security Agency in Washington, D.C., and another is president of a Chinese-American joint trading company.
Other graduates of the master's program have gone on to doctoral work at Yale, Columbia, University of Washington, University of Chicago, University of Michigan, Cornell, Indiana, University of Wisconsin and UCLA, while others have remained at CU-Boulder to pursue their doctorates.
Examples of the latter are Michelle Low and Tina Jenkins.
"After I graduated in 1998, I went to Taiwan to a prestigious language institute where I studied with Ph.D. and M.A. students from other universities with well known Asian studies programs, such as Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, UCLA and Hawaii," said Low.
"I found my training and understanding of Chinese literature and history to encompass much more breadth and depth than most of theirs.
"The faculty here are among the best in the nation, if not the world, especially in premodern texts. The atmosphere they have helped to create makes this a wonderful learning experience. That is one of the main reasons I chose to return to CU-Boulder to do my Ph.D.," she said.
Jenkins, lead graduate instructor for the program, agreed.
"Not only are the faculty members enthusiastic and accomplished with their own research, they respect our efforts and ability as students who are becoming their colleagues," Jenkins said.
"The graduate students in our department have an exceptional camaraderie. Rather than a competitive environment where each must protect his own, we enjoy an atmosphere of mutual support and encouragement."
The department of East Asian languages and civilizations was established as an independent academic unit of the College of Arts and Sciences in 1982. The master's program in Chinese was inaugurated in 1989 and the first student graduated in 1992. Since then, 35 students have graduated with the M.A. degree. There are currently 15 students in the M.A. program.
The doctoral program is a special track in the Comparative Literature Program, supervised by the China faculty in conjunction with the faculty in Comparative Literature.
The department of East Asian languages and civilizations is the only department in the state of Colorado to offer either undergraduate or graduate degree programs in Chinese and Japanese, and the only department in the CU system to focus entirely on the study of non-Western cultures.
Both in its specialized curricula and in the general-education courses it offers, such as the popular "Introduction to Traditional East Asian Civilizations" (EALC 1011) taught every spring, it is a unique and invaluable resource for the university and for the state.