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Postscript A Good Night’s Sleep

Despite his advanced age, Wash remained deeply concerned with and involved in AIM
affairs as its Chairman Emeritus. AIM had named its School of Business after him.

“As Chairman Emeritus, he rarely missed a meeting,” says Jikyeong. She remembers,
how during meetings, he would just keep his head down, leaving the people around
him to wonder what he was pondering. But then, he’d surprise everyone after a long
silence to make a comment.

Jikyeong recalls that at the last AIM Board of Trustees meeting that he attended on
September 7, Wash exclaimed, “Finally, AIM is doing something I always wanted
AIM to do!” He was commenting on AIM’s need to collaborate with institutions
working in STEM (Science and Technology, Engineering, Math). He added that
“I’ve been always telling AIM, you need to work with engineering schools… so
finally I can rest.”

Passionate, energetic, and acutely aware of the global business climate and the need
for business schools to be responsive to its turns, Jikyeong is keen for AIM to consider
multidisciplinary approaches to business and management education by looking for
synergies between science and technology as well as other social sciences.

In 2018, AIM set up a School of Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship
(SITE). “It houses our Master in Entrepreneurship program, the Master of Science in
Innovation and Business, and the newest, the Master of Science in Data Science. This
was a program Mr. SyCip really, really liked,” she reports. AIM’s data science program
was the first in the country supported by a fast and powerful supercomputer donated
by Acer from Taiwan. “Our data science graduate will have a mini-MBA in addition
to a data science degree, and this kind of curriculum is not being offered anywhere
else in the world,” she adds.

AIM now has seven master’s programs and one PhD program. In 2020, it launched
the PhD in Data Science, the first in the country. As a response to changing market
needs, five out of the seven master’s programs are now being offered part-time. “With
the full-time program, our international students range from about 20-30 percent.”
Jikyeong hopes to raise it to 40 percent.

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