2B Final SAPSA: International Admission

Rachel Wong, Anna Yang, Hoang Phuong Vy Nguyen

Professor Caroline Kieu Linh Valverde

TA: Kaozong Mouavangsou

ASA02 SAPSA Project

June 5, 2017

International Admission

Powerpoint: http://bit.ly/2stefkq  

Education is now a commodity sought by international students striving for what they perceive as a better education. Their pursuit of a Western education is a product of what A. A. Phillips coined as “culture cringe." Cultural cringe is an internalized inferiority complex, which causes people to view their own culture as inferior to the cultures of other countries. This creates a tendency to discount a lot of one's own culture, and embrace another country's ‘better' culture instead. In the case of international students, although they take pride in their own culture, they still associate Western culture and education as better. Thus, they are willing to pay any price tag even if it means they achieve academic and career successes. Though it is unclear as to whether their financial investments actually paid of, but with certainty:

• Higher education has transformed from a public good into a commodity on a transnational market.
• Universities have become the largest for-profit company, where students are its customers and faculty are its sellers.
• Understanding the increase in international students is only scratching the surface of grasping the corporate nature of universities

Even though our video specifically focuses on international students admission to UC Davis, we hope that everyone walks away with an open mind. Particularly for those who equates having a successful career with a college degree, all we ask of them is to do your research, consider their options, know what they are getting yourself into, and prevent themselves from overpaying for an experience that may or may not grant them their desired goal(s).

We came across a few obstacles during the making of this SAPSA. The biggest challenge was synthesizing content into the five-minute mark. It was difficult to include and synthesize interviews while ensuring that the overall message is still fitting and effective. Another obstacle was writing the script. We had to adjust the script several times because of the time limit, the content received from our interviews, and the feedback we received from our classmates. We also wanted to make sure that the SAPSA is informative and captivating, and that the audience would walk away with the same vision we had for this SAPSA.

Once we published our SAPSA, we created a survey and asked random individuals who were either international or domestic student to assess our video against on our objectives and goals. Majority of the feedback we received were positive as at least 85 percent of them said they learned something new, would walk away with an open-mind and that we met our objectives. We believe 85 percent is a fairly good number to achieve but if we were given the opportunity to revamp this SAPSA, we would certainly aim for 100 percent.

In the case that we were given the opportunity to remake this SAPSA, there are a few things we would like to improve. First of all, we want to better the informational and educational aspect of the video. We can achieve this by going beyond the five-minute limit to include ways in which universities have marketed themselves to students, more specifically, international students, to get them to apply. A few examples would be brochures/handbooks designed for international students brochure, sending representatives abroad to conduct outreach programs, and so on. We can also dig deeper by looking into the admission process at UC Davis, specifically, factors that determine a student's admission. Furthermore, extending the time limit will also improve our conclusion considering the one we currently went by very fast and ended quite abruptly. We believe with the extra time, we can slow down the voiceover and include a fade-to-black effect as this will better empower our message and vision for this SAPSA. Lastly, we would like to advertise our SAPSA to as many audiences as possible. To achieve this goal, we can post our video onto social media platforms such as Facebook and request our viewers to leave a comment. This way, we can actually generate conversations and evoke more reactions and further carry out our objective.