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One of my favorite memories as a TAS student was working on a paper cutting project in Grade 5, after becoming an art teacher, I’ve made it a tradition to teach the same project to my students. I usually don’t tell students I’m an alumna, but occasionally there will be students that make the connection when they discover my painting, “Tiger in Thought”, which hangs on the second floor next to the Central Office. I painted it in my sophomore year as an IASAS submission, and Mark Ulfers, who was the superintendent at the time, asked if I could gift the painting to the school. As a student, TAS gave me many valuable opportunities to see the world and to take part in challenges where you try your best, whether it’s art or sports. In those situations, it brings out the Tiger spirit in you.   

I attended Rhode Island School of Design, and after college, I traveled and worked at an art auction company based in Asia. While vacationing in Taiwan one year, I took the opportunity to sub at TAS and realized I really enjoyed teaching, so I went back to RISD for an art education degree, and now it’s my twelfth year as an art teacher in the lower school.  

Working at TAS is just like coming home. Mr. Arnold always brings flowers to my classroom on the first day of each school year. I’ve also known a lot of the secretaries and lunch ladies here since I was little and they still ask how my mom’s doing. TAS has provided an amazing environment for me to grow as an art teacher. I know my strengths and how I can use them to help kids. It’s allowed me a lot of room for creativity and freedom to engage students in many different disciplines of art. I have a deep appreciation for how this school, the PTA, and administration give us so much opportunity and support to coordinate bigger art projects beyond the art room. 

I have been at TAS from Tiger Tots to Grade 12. I joined last year as a substitute, and this year, I’m teaching Grade 3. There are many things that are similar, like I remember doing projects on animals, which is the same unit I’m teaching to students. The lower school also offers curriculum in robotics and STEAM too. As an alumna who teaches, kids relate to the anecdotes I tell them. We’re able to share a deeper connection, and they know where I’m coming from because they have a similar background.  

I moved back to Taiwan to be closer to home, and when I returned to TAS, I was curious to see how the campus, curriculum, and the community have evolved. It’s familiar, but not entirely the same as when I left. I had that first-hand experience with what TAS has been, and now, it’s great to be back where I started my journey and to be a part of its growth. 

I go over the TAS values with my students on a daily basis. The values continue to shape who I am and how I carry myself. Embedding that into my day-to-day life changed my mindset and my behavior as a young adult. As an educator now, I want to continue to practice these values with my students and hopefully encourage my students to become more motivated to learn and excited about coming to school. Grade 3 students can walk away not understanding all of the concepts of fractions, but I’d rather they learn how to be a good person and have a good solid character education. The academics will come eventually, but our job as teachers is to teach them to respect each other and to be kind.   

I was hired by John Stander in 1992 to come to TAS to teach Grade 6 English and social studies. My teaching degree is in language arts (reading, writing, listening, speaking, visual representation) and social studies, but John also wanted me to design and facilitate a ropes course since I was trained in the US to do so, and that’s why I moved to Physical Education. In addition to PE, I taught on the ropes course for probably 23 or 24 years, followed by a move to the classroom to teach public speaking for 6 years.   

I got to know Julia, Stephanie, (badminton) and the Lee cousins (badminton and volleyball) as their varsity coach. The Lee family is kind of a badminton dynasty. If you look at all the IASAS championships that TAS has won, probably ten or more championships are directly attributable to the Lee family, either in badminton or volleyball. Steph played doubles for me, and Julia played singles. We got to know each other through hours of practice, matches, and multiple IASAS trips. Throughout it all, the Lee families treated me with respect and kindness, they were incredible. Julia and Stephanie, and all the girls I coached, were fully dedicated to the program and to improving while at the same time willing to help others along the way. I think being part of a team and the IASAS experience can make for great memories for the athletes and coaches, so when former student athletes come back on campus and see you, we get to talk and relive all those great memories. When Steph came back to teach art in the lower school, I would occasionally see her in the hallways, allowing us to chat and catch up. I now see Julia more often as we share the same title as assistant coaches to the varsity badminton program. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Steph, Julia, the Lee families, and all the student athletes I coached over the years for so many wonderful memories.  

When I came to TAS, I showed up basically with a backpack. TAS and Taiwan changed my life. I met my wife here. I raised my kids here. I really enjoyed working at TAS, and I feel very fortunate to have landed a job here. I can’t imagine not having been here in the last thirty years because it’s given me so much.   

My mother, Sherry Boyle, is now one of the longest tenured teachers at TAS. She has taught at TAS since before I was born, so my brother Aidan ’21 and I were naturally both Tiger Babies. 

In my 14 years at TAS, my favorite memories were definitely the Model United Nations trips I was able to go on. We have an incredible program that allowed me to travel to Kuala Lumpur in 8th grade, debate against university students at THIMUN Singapore my freshman year, to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall at BERMUN as a sophomore, and to go back to Berlin as a senior. I always look back on those as incredible experiences where I had exposure to the basics of international politics, and how people from all over the world approach the issues of our time. 

In 8th Grade, I remember meeting two older students who came in to speak to the middle school MUN travel teams. I remember how well-spoken and knowledgeable they were, and I thought that if I could be that person and even inspire one kid to commit to MUN, that would be doing my part to keep this amazing program going. In 2021, I had just come back from serving as an assistant at the UN for one year. Mrs. Darby Sinclair and Mrs. Kristin Rowe, who are the matriarchs of TAS Model UN, invited me to come back and talk to students, because as far as we know, I’m the only alum who went from MUN to the actual UN, and I know exactly how MUN can translate to that kind of a career path. When I started working there, I relied so much on what I’d learned in high school about the UN committees and basic UN procedure. TAS offers an amazing education, and we were so fortunate to have those resources and people that TAS brought in to teach us forensics, debate, and Model UN.   

My brother and I often ask our dad, Jim Boyle ’76, about what it used to be like to attend this school. It feels special to be a part of an institution not only within the family but also something that has become a symbol of enduring US-Taiwan relations. I’m in my first year of a master’s in international affairs at Columbia SIPA, concentrating in international security, so I interact with a lot of people who study China and Taiwan, but they don’t know the most basic things about this country. People who are born and grew up in Taiwan casually know things that are very hard to understand if you’re studying about us in a vacuum. That’s part of why this school is such a special international space.  

Meeting another TAS alum out in the world is like discovering a bond. You have this shared understanding of all the work that you both put into your experience at TAS, whether it’s APs or IBs or if you did IASAS. When you meet someone and you find out they’re from TAS, it’s a signal that they are a certain kind of person like you, like an international citizen, a bridge between countries. We recognize without really saying anything that we’re similar in the ways our identities are constructed, and how we move through the world. 

My family came over to Taiwan in 1968. My father took leave from Westinghouse to set up one of the first electronics factories in Hsinchu for a local entrepreneur. 

My three brothers and I all graduated from TAS. When I was here, we used to spend a lot of time at the beach, surfing at Jinshan, Wanli, and sometimes Kenting. We loved the old Wenlin Road campus too. We had our graduation ceremony at Zhongshan Tang in Ximending. After graduate school, I came back to visit my parents, and the next thing to know, I had a job. I’ve worked in different companies and businesses in Asia for the last thirty years, but I always seemed to gravitate back to Taipei. 

I now teach courses in marketing, business and entrepreneurship, and history of Asia in the upper school. Most of my students are rather astonished when they find out I’m an alumnus, but even more astonished when they find out that I had Mr. Arnold for World Cultures and US History in high school too. Being an alumnus gives me a little bit of credibility. There’s an understanding of what they’re into and involved with. Seamus and Aidan both attended TAS, and my wife Sherry works here too, so our lives revolved around school to a large degree, like the back to school nights, the violin concerts, and the TYPA sports. For a while, we rented the gym on Sunday morning, and I’d bring the boys down to play basketball.  

Taipei is a big city, but within that big city, there’s a very small tight-knit group of people who are associated with TAS. I wear a lot of different proverbial hats when I look at TAS: I am an old alum who was here back in the day, I had two children who were Tiger Babies and I got to see everything they’ve done here, I have a wife who’s been here teaching, and now I’m teaching too. From those different viewpoints, I can only conclude that TAS had a huge impact on my life. It was just the way that life worked out, and I’m very happy that it did.  

Seamus Boyle ’17 joined our Grade 8 MUN travel team to Malaysia (MYMUN) where he had the opportunity to practice researching, problem-solving, negotiating and debating with an extraordinary cohort of TAS students. I remember we took a photo of Seamus and his fellow students who went to fetch their dinner before meeting at a designated hotel room. We found them all gathered ahead of schedule in the hallway outside, folders open, already deep into collaborative prep. The enthusiasm of this group for learning together was pretty special. As an upper school student, Seamus continued to make himself available to mentor middle school students as he had seen others do for him. With his college MUN experience and then his work at the UN itself in NYC, Seamus was a natural guest speaker for my International Politics elective for Grade 8 students. Students are my biggest inspiration, and Seamus is a wonderful example of a TAS student who is willing to challenge themselves, push past their comfort zone, experience the deep, intrinsic reward of succeeding at hard things, and then pay it forward to other students.    

I feel like a walking cliché of all the reasons why TAS is a fantastic school. But it boils down to the fact that our school has incredible resources, human and otherwise, to support individuals to pursue their passions and experience the positive feedback loop of success, wherever that may be. My two children thrived here when they entered at Grade 5 after starting their education at local primary school. They pursued drama, dance, and athletics to the IASAS level. They continued their Mandarin language education through to the IB Bilingual Diploma level, which has now helped my eldest daughter transition into university.    

In the same way that my kids were supported to pursue their passions, I have been supported to pursue my professional goals as a teacher. I collaborate daily with other deeply knowledgeable, invested, and diverse faculty. This is a community of continual learning at every level. Many colleagues have also become dear friends. We share the minutiae of daily lesson planning as well as major life experiences such as weddings, babies, and birthdays. TAS has supported me to pursue professional development in the US and across Asia, and I have been invited to serve on curriculum review committees, lead departments, and recruit new administrators and faculty. And of course, Model UN is a personal passion that has grown from just a single team in the upper school to become a Grades 6-12 program with hundreds of students involved each year. Every overseas conference experience has both opened my eyes and deepened my gratitude for the opportunity to live in Taipei and work at TAS.   

When we moved to Taiwan in 2003 from Japan, my mom knew that TAS would be the best place for us as budding Third Culture Kids (TCKs), because she had attended TAS.

In elementary school, I did TYPA sports on Saturdays, and we spent the whole day at school. One weekend when I was in third grade, my mom took me through B-Block, and reminisced with me about these hallways where she used to hang out. That’s how we ran into Mr. Arnold, her favorite high school teacher, who was doing Pack and Mail Day with Orphanage Club. Before I knew it, I found myself at a table helping out with OC. Mr. Arnold goes way back with my family – he knew my aunt who graduated in 1979 and my mom who graduated in 1984. He will know things I don’t even know about my own family.   

In middle school, I started doing Model United Nations (MUN), because I loved debating and research. I never got chosen for IASAS and top-tier conferences, but I just really enjoyed the whole thing. In junior and senior year, I started heavily mentoring middle school students. I joined this online Model UN program, and I became the first TAS student who went to The Hague International Model UN Conference. Model UN really helped me to get to know Darby and Kristin and really gave me opportunities to teach and mentor others. It’s how I learned how to connect with students and build relationships. I’m still running Model UN at my school today. My time at TAS and my time working with Darby and Kristin was so influential. Without them, I would not be a teacher.   

I loved my time at TAS, and I tell people that unashamedly. I learned a lot of things during my time at TAS outside the classroom, like running school assemblies. Taking on those responsibilities gave me a sense for how I could give back to the school. As a Class Agent volunteer and being involved at TAS, I love helping the environment grow and making things happen.   

When I attended TAS, our school was quite the melting pot for people of different races, nationalities, and backgrounds. There was a special bond amongst the students which encouraged us to experience the unique culture and East-West educational involvement TAS offered. We also still had many US military dependents as schoolmates. However, in my senior year, US de-recognized Taiwan, and in a week’s time, the US military repatriated, and we lost a third of our class. As senior class president that year, I realized how much life is beyond our control and anything can change overnight. Activities such as our “Journeys into Asian Culture” class and Orphanage Club left such an impact in my life, helping me better understand my roots and upbringing as a Chinese American and also motivating me to exercise benevolence in my work life. My sister, Felicia ’84, avidly volunteered at TAS and served on the TAS Board of Directors for six years. Her two sons, Nick and Matthew, also attended and graduated from TAS. Many friends, like my sister, became TAS parents when they sent their own children there, so we now have second generation TAS alumni.  

Ever since I joined Special Olympics East Asia as Regional President and Managing Director in 2018, my wish was to introduce our Special Olympics Movement and our aim of inclusion to my alma mater, TAS. We are now working with Mrs. Darby Sinclair and the Model UN students at TAS to do just that. By serving the intellectually disabled athletes at Special Olympics, we aim to help our intellectually disabled athletes gain dignity, respect and opportunity through sports and non-sports activities. By integrating Special Olympics athletes with non-disabled counterparts, not only do our athletes benefit but the non-disabled youths gain even more by learning acceptance, advocacy, and other valued lessons from our special athletes. I sincerely hope TAS will embrace the Special Olympics cause and motto left by our late founder, Mrs. Eunice Kennedy Shriver which is: “Let me win. But if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt.” As our friends at the United Nations emphasize and we agree, may we never “leave anyone behind”! 

As a school, TAS has left a strong imprint in my life, teaching me how multi-cultural my schoolmates, myself, and others in the TAS community really are. I am grateful for the education I received at TAS and for great dedicated teachers like Mr. Richard Arnold. I hope to be able to encourage current TAS students the importance of inclusion and acceptance through my efforts and work at Special Olympics.

I arrived at TAS in 1998 as an intern teacher. It was such a fantastic experience that I stayed until 2001 and became a full-time teacher. I moved away afterwards, but in 2007, my husband David became the IT Director here, and we moved back. I returned to teach Asian history but later transitioned into teaching in the Social Science department. 

Nick Yeh ’13 was the catalyst for our Middle School Model United Nations (MUN) program. Nick was a very earnest and curious Grade 8 student, so he asked if he could sit in on and listen to the upper school MUN sessions, but of course, he was not actually the kind to just sit and listen. He wanted to ask a lot of questions and know more about MUN. Kristin Rowe and I thought, there much be a lot of students like that, so we began TASMUN, our own conference, and we now have a Grades 5 through 12 MUN program. Nick has developed many connections for TAS. His connection to the online MUN program later developed into an internationally UN-recognized NGO, MUN Impact. Likewise, many subsequent TAS students have participated in and taken leading roles in the NGO. His connections also enabled many of our students to attend the Qatar Leadership Conference hosted by the Qatar Foundation and for us to create deep and lasting connections with Afghan Model UN organizations. Rarely a day goes by when I’m not in communication with someone who was connected to me by Nick.   

As the regional director for East Asia Special Olympics, Nick’s aunt Freda Fung ’79 is now connecting TAS to the Taipei Special School. We hope to develop deeper programming with them. Because Freda motivated us to learn about the Special Olympics, my daughter is now going to Berlin this summer to be a translator and delegate host at the Special Olympics World Games.   

When I think of places I want to go in my career or personal life, the first question that I ask is “How can I be in a community?” What brings me joy is having raised my children in the TAS community. The stories and relationships I have from this community are really incredible and lifelong and valuable to me, and that’s true for me in the greater Taipei and Taiwan community too. When you’re with people for a long time, you become familiar with their joys and hardships, and you see a responsibility to shape that community for others. This is why I chose to be an educator.  

When I was in local school, a classmate casually told me one day, out of an innocent kindness, that I would never be Taiwanese because as a mixed-race kid, I didn’t “look Taiwanese.” As a young tween, I really took that to heart. I thought if I couldn’t change how I looked on the outside, I would change who I was on the inside in order to belong somewhere. I proposed to my parents to send me to a boarding school in the U.S., they were not thrilled by that idea, so instead at Grade 9, I transferred to TAS. At that age, Americans (other than the family members I knew) felt foreign and terrifying to me. TAS was an environment where I was introduced to American sub-cultures that I could relate to, one where people had multiracial, multilingual, and multicultural backgrounds like me. 

TAS was also a place where I began exploring my sense of self beyond just the cultural and racial identities. My time in dance classes and in the dance studio was where the majority of this exploration took place; Mrs. Flemming encouraged and supported me to express my ideas, emotions, and self through movement, and I was especially drawn to dance as a means of expression and communication that transcended language. I am also really grateful to have teachers, like Mrs. Lin, Mr. Fox, and Mr. Vandenboom, who were passionate about the subjects they taught and challenged me to find meaning and connection between the course subject and an aspect of my identity or sense of self. 

During my four years in Upper School, the question of “Who am I?” continually emerged in the curriculum, and I think this set the stage for me to continue to explore my identity throughout my young adulthood and into the present day. I am eternally grateful to have had this question at the foundational core of my being, as I think it’s one of the most important questions to explore in life, and it set me up to live a life full of meaningful explorations and growth. As a mental health therapist, I primarily work with QTBIPOC (Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Color. I love supporting people with complex identities and histories to find a greater sense of healing and liberation. I’ve found that a core part of the healing process is the discovery of one’s identity – a full sense of self that is constantly emerging and becoming, has agency and joy, and can thrive even while living with the realities of trauma and oppression.  

When I reflect more deeply about the community that would be the most meaningful for me to support, I keep finding myself thinking about the multicultural, multiracial, and multilingual community of TAS and the people of Taiwan. I hope one day to come back home to Taiwan and to TAS, and together explore the questions “Who am I?” and “Who are we as a community?” and flourish together. 

My older sister Bayeshan convinced my parents to send us to TAS, and I think I just followed her, because it was the perk of being a younger sibling. I always got in trouble in local school, because I didn’t like being told what to do. I got a lot of trouble for asking questions in class. I remember my first day at TAS because it was the first time in my life that nobody in Taiwan stared at me and called me a foreigner. Within the first week, I realized that when I challenged things, my teachers actually liked it.  

I started teaching history here in 2018. I think that having an alumnus teacher matters a lot to the kids. I automatically have this connection with students. At the beginning of the year, I point to my IASAS medals and my graduation pennant in my classroom. It allows me to talk about our school and community and students in a particular way, and I think kids appreciate that perspective. As a teacher, I’m on the other side now, but at the same time, I do still feel like the way I was a student here. My primary concern is still: how are we treating students? I care about how our students are more than anything else.  

I tell people all the time that TAS saved me. TAS allowed me to explore all these things about myself. I could choose classes I wanted to take. I was encouraged to express myself, challenge things, think critically and to disagree. It also helped bridge this gap, because as a kid, I felt American in appearance only, but I never had an American friend until I came to TAS. It helped me find a missing part of myself. 

When I was hired in 1990, I was the fourth Mandarin teacher at TAS. Since then, the Mandarin program has grown so much. TAS has been a great learning experience for me. I have had so many professional development opportunities.   

Weston and Bayeshan were both my students in IBHL Mandarin. Weston in particular loved history. Our Mandarin course focused on literature, but we had discussions about the historical background of the authors too, and Weston was always very interested in Chinese history. After class, he would stick around and ask me a lot of questions about history. After he graduated, Weston would email me once or twice a year to see how I was doing. I really enjoyed the IB program because I taught students for two years and developed a deeper relationship with them. When Weston began teaching at TAS, he came to see me. He knew I had been diagnosed with cancer in 2009. We have since shared a lot with each other. I feel that he’s not simply my former student anymore, he’s more like a son to me.   

I am now the oldest faculty member in the Mandarin program. I always tell students, when you graduate, you’re competing with a lot of people out in the world. If you know Chinese as well as English, then you’re going to have a better chance. Now, more students are choosing to stay in Taiwan, and they keep in touch and tell me how they’re doing. I care about our students and want them to do well, not just in their class but in general, and I think that they feel that care and love. No matter how they’re doing in class, I encourage them, and I get to know them as people. I have been able to learn so much from them, and I am fortunate to have taught for so long.