With the authorization of the Ministry of Education, the training program (Approved Project No. MOE31US2A20222240N) in cooperation with West Virginia University (WVU) oriented to the majors of information management and information system at the undergraduate level, which our university applied in October 2021, was officially ratified.
The cooperative program between SUEP-SIF delving in the domains of information technology and management is a powerful integration of their dominant disciplines, focusing on the marketing demands for the talents with the global energy transformation and upgrading and the rapid development of information technology, in answer to the call of the digital transformation initiated in Shanghai. It is designed to train interdisciplinary professionals with international vision and expertise in the domains of both energy and information. The program offers a 3 + 1 (namely, students receive education for three years at home and one year abroad) training mode with two degrees provided to the undergraduates, and an annual enrollment is expected to be 120 students.
Established in 1867, West Virginia University is the most important public comprehensive, research university in Western Virginia, which has been rated by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education as a Level (R1) research university (one of the top 115 research universities in the United States). The university consists of 15 colleges, with the qualification to offer 359 bachelor, master’s and doctoral degrees as well as more than 29,000 full-time students. The John Chambers School of Business, founded in 1951, received AACSB accreditation in 1954.
In applying for the cooperative program, the administrations of both universities gave much importance to how it proceeded since the beginning through. Despite the various difficulties such as the online communication they had to choose due to the pandemic and 12-hour time difference they had to overcome, the faculty and staffs of the two universities conducted active cooperation without any complaint. The administration of the College of Economics and Management and the concerned teaching staffs spared no pains to formulate the joint training program, and the Department of Financial Affairs, the President’s Office, the Office of Academic Affairs and other relevant departments of this university also hesitated not to give their support to review and revise the program until it was passed without any objection. In October 2021 the protocol got through the keen scrutiny and oral defense launched by the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission and then submitted to the Ministry of Education in late October.
This program is another Sino-foreign cooperative educational initiative at the undergraduate level approved by the Ministry of Education, second to the one with the University of Strathclyde in the major of electrical engineering in 2004.It will be of great significance for us to strengthen international communication and cooperation with foreign universities, to make available more overseas high-quality educational resources, train more high-level interdisciplinary professionals with international vision, and promote academic international exchanges and improve our competitive strength in the concerned disciplines. The ratification of this protocol is another striking milestone for our university to speed up the construction of a high-level local university and propel our opening to the outside world.
Contributor: College of Economics and Management