Director's Corner

The students, staff and faculty of the Asian Pacific American Studies program celebrate many different new years. In addition to the Chinese New Year that began on February 18, we also celebrate Hmong New Year, Vietnamese New Year, the Jewish New Year and January 1! Each academic year also offers us new opportunities.  And this year may be full of the most new developments since the program was started (after twenty years of student, staff and faculty advocacy) just two years ago.

When the academic year started in fall 2006, we had a completely new staff: myself working as acting director for one year while Director Andrea Louie takes an overdue research leave; Joe Cousins taking over for Shina Steinberg as our program coordinator; and, a new program assistant, one of our great APA Studies specialization students, Gyul John Ra.  At the beginning of the semester, we also hired a new webmaster, Jor Vue, and a new program manager, Meaghan Kozar, to develop and administer our new APA Studies Research and Leadership program! We have welcomed six new specialization students this year and five APA Studies professorial assistants, raising the number of our undergraduate students to 45.  Finally, we have two new faculty who focus on APA Studies and have joined our Advisory Board: Frederick Leong (Psychology) and Desiree Qin (Family and Child Ecology).

Of course, many of our new staff and faculty have long been involved in the APA community and APA Studies, either at MSU or other campuses.  And our research and leadership program was in development last year.  However, it seems like an appropriate time to start this newsletter to introduce you to some of our news.  Whenever you celebrate New Year, I hope you’ll join us in celebrating these new developments.  This certainly has been a happy New Year!