Alumni Speakers and Volunteers

Stephen Wu ’10

The TAS Business Club welcomed two speakers this year. Stephen Wu ’10 recently graduated from Cornell with his MBA and joined American Express full-time to work on payment network strategy. He shared his MBA experience with students. Darren Chien ’16 works at Burnt Finance as a business development associate and talked to students about his journey and previous job at Foursquare.

Darren Chien ’16

Girls in STEM welcomed Dr. Jaime Lien ’01 who is the Radar Research Lead of Project Soli at Google Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP). Jaime shared her work at Project Soli on using radar to detect spatial changes and how the algorithm translates that into information. With Project Soli, consumers can make a smartphone skip a song or increase volume through just hand gestures and not touching the phone.

Seamus Boyle ’17 visited TAS during his winter break as a guest speaker in Mrs. Rowe’s middle school international relations class and for Mrs. Sinclair’s MUN teams.

The annual Rise Up Summit (formerly known as Girl Up) in March 2022 welcomed several alumnae for a panel discussion on their experience as women in professional industries: Christina Huang ’99 who runs Manloy Metal Industrial Co., Ltd, a company which sells electrical steel and insulation materials to transformer and motor manufacturers; Nina Shih ’01, User Experience Design Lead at Google Fitbit, and Karen Jung ’05, Marketing Operations Manager at Epson America. Thank you to these alumnae for sharing their experiences! This year’s student-run NOVA Entrepreneurship Competition also welcomed alumni mentors and judges who were able to provide very helpful feedback and guidance to nearly 100 student entrepreneurs from TAS and four other international schools, as they addressed the challenge of creating new consumer tech that can help address a social problem. A big thanks to Jim Boyle ’76, Chen Jun Luo ’07, Jane Chen ’08, Weston Wang Cooper ’08 and Roxanne Lo ’08.

In March 2022, parent and board member Jay Cheng ’97 was invited by the upper school Student Government board to talk about his career during a flex period. Having started his first business during his sophomore year at USC, Jay has accumulated ample experience in the tech-business industry. He shared about his unique path to success, the transitions from college to profession, as well as insights on the tech industry today. Jay advised students as they went through high school and college to focus on emotional intelligence, knowing their own strengths and weaknesses, making mistakes early, and following their passions.