Twelve UWM students fly to Foxconn’s Taiwan plant

While questions still swirl over Foxconn Technology Group’s massive project in Wisconsin, 12 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee students were psyched Friday to depart on a 7,000mile flight to Taipei in an international co-op set up by the company, UWM and Chung Yuan Christian University.

The students will stay at Chung Yuan Christian University in Taoyuan City, where they will take a cultural course and learn basic Mandarin. They will also visit Foxconn’s LCD (liquid crystal display) plant in the southern area of the state, earning college credits as they learn the design, fabrication, manufacturing and application of LCDs, which have not traditionally been made in the United States.

One of the students, senior Austin Wesner, described it as the opportunity of a lifetime.

Wesner is majoring in biomedical engineering and said he applied because he was excited about the MGroup Foxconn created to explore medical applications for their technology.

“It’s something I really wanted to do because it’s my dream to become an engineer,” he said at a sendoff gathering Friday. “With the medical group being built in Foxconn, I did some research ... and oncology is one of their main research areas and that’s something that interested me greatly.”

“I hope to gain insight into what school is like in a different culture, and I want to take in as much as possible,” he said.

Liam Brody, another senior, is majoring in civil engineering. He was one of the first people to apply because he was interested in the company’s focus on water resources.

“I knew that the Foxconn plant would have tremendous opportunity, particularly when I found out how water-intensive the liquid crystal module display would be,” he said. “Given that, I decided I wanted to get into reclamation and sanitation as well as work to mitigate the environmental impact.”

Brody also mentioned that he is looking to gain experience in the private sector, traveling and learning Chinese.

Brett Peters, the dean of UWM’s College of Engineering and Applied Science, said he was proud of the students and admired their courage.

“I want to praise your courage for stepping off into a unique adventure,” he said, joking that he wished he was going and encouraging students to “take advantage of being immersed in another culture.”

The co-op expanded from five students to 12, due to the volume of applications.

The Taiwanese company has made headlines in 2019 over the uncertainty surrounding its Wisconsin project — agreed to after state and local governments pledged a massive $4 billion package of tax breaks and subsidies in return for Foxconn’s promise to spend $10 billion on its Mount Pleasant facility and to hire 13,000 workers in Wisconsin.

Foxconn proposed building a LCD “fab” or microchip fabrication plant in the U.S. in 2017. The company appeared to pull back from building an LCD plant to instead create a technology hub in late January, before confirming that they would actually build an LCD plant earlier this month.

Foxconn has also come under fire for failing to show much progress on the state-of-the-art headquarters facility they were supposed to be building in downtown Milwaukee.

However, Wesner said he was specifically interested in Foxconn because of what it was bringing to Wisconsin.

“I read about the jaw-dropping project on numerous news outlets,” he said.

UWM Provost Johannes Britz thanked Foxconn for being “co-instrumental” in helping fulfill the university’s mission:

“We are instruments to allow you to become who you want to be,” he said. “It’s not just about job placement ... it’s also about fulfillment.”

The students are expected to return during the first week of July.