LAX, UCI, MBA . . . Zzzzzzzz
Next time you’re trading sob stories with co-workers about your day’s commute, think of Dr. Chao Shao Hua.
Like many commuters, the UC Irvine student must deal with traffic jams, rain-slick roads and dangerously clueless drivers. But for Chao, those headaches come after he’s finished the first leg of his commute--from Taiwan.
“The jet lag is terrible,” Chao, 42, says of his 13,000-mile round-trip flights from Taipei to Los Angeles. The part-time student and world-class commuter has lost track of how many flights--at $1,000 a pop--he’s taken.
Chao, a dentist, will graduate with 53 classmates this month with a master’s in business administration from the Graduate School of Management. Students in the two-year health-care executive course meet once a month for a four-day period, and Chao has been here for each session.
Colleagues back home “told me I was crazy,” says Chao, who owns Jaws Dental Clinic, one of Taipei’s largest. “They said, ‘Why do you need the extra pressure?’ But they take my patients for me while I’m here.”
Chao says he hopes his management training will open doors in the health-care field, both here and in Taiwan. He has explored serving as a distributor in Asia for laser-based dental equipment.
“Most dentists and doctors don’t know business,” says Chao, the only dentist among dozens of physicians in the class. “Knowledge is power. The diploma doesn’t really matter; it’s the knowledge and the contacts.”
For about 10 years Chao has spent summer holidays in Southern California. Three years ago, an ad he saw in The Times got him interested in UCI’s Health Care Executive MBA program, which trains doctors, nurses and other medical professionals in management theory and practice.
To improve his English for graduate studies he took an English as a second language course but complains that, next to fighting jet lag, English is still his biggest challenge. One learning aid: a lot of TV. “I even leave it on when I sleep, in case that helps,” he says.
In class he’s generally quiet but does raise interesting points about Asian health care, says Joanna Ho, UCI professor of accounting.
“It’s helpful to hear about how things work in Taiwan, and it provokes discussion in class,” she says. “People have to think about whether these practices can be applied in a general way.”
When Chao began his commuting regimen, he decided to invest in a house in Irvine. Soon after, his wife, Joyce, and three sons moved to California. They live there most the year, returning to Taiwan for winter and summer vacations.
To help alleviate jet lag, Chao arrives a week before classes begin. He says he doesn’t take caffeine or other drugs but in class uses what he calls “spontaneous reflexes” to try to stay alert.
It doesn’t always work. “Sometimes when I see him nodding his head, I’m not sure if he truly understands my point or is sleeping,” Ho says with a laugh, adding that Chao is a motivated student and in general manages his jet lag well.
During the 12-hour flights, Chao sleeps, reads and does homework on a laptop computer. His frequent-flier miles--numbering in the hundreds of thousands--allow him to upgrade to business class.
And Chao has become something of a trendsetter, UCI officials say. The class that began the semester after Chao’s includes several doctors who commute from the Bay Area and from out of state. A woman from Switzerland has enrolled in the session beginning in January.
Although the commute has taken its toll, things could be worse, Chao says: “At one point I was looking into a different MBA course, and that one is in Florida.”
