My Advisor:

My advisor is Dr. Angsana Techatassanasoontorn. Just like many other Thai, she has a pretty long last name. So far as I know, she is the only Thai professor at University Park. Puck (who is a Thai student in IST) once told me that there was a student in penn state who wanted to conduct an interview with a Thai professor. He searched the whole faculty list and surprisingly, he found Dr. Angsana is the only one.

Dr. Angsana has got her family with her in State College. She has a very adorable daughter. But I don't think I have the liberty to post her daughter's photo. Dr. Angsana's husband also works here. As for her hobbies, she likes yoga and takes yoga courses every Friday.

Dr. Angsana has a relatively rich experience in terms of her career. Graduating from the best university in Thailand, she starts off her career as a programmer in two companies sequentially. At this job, Dr. angsana got her passion of using knowledge to teach and train others. About fifteen years ago, she went to Arizona Univ. to further her master degree with concentration on MIS. After that, she came back to Thailand and worked as a college instructor for seven years. In 2000, she began her PhD training at Univ. of Minnesota, which has the largest MIS center in the world. The department chair and well-known scholar in the field of MIS, Professor Robert J. Kauffman is the very advisor of her. In 2005 she came to Penn State as an instructor and then become an assistant professor of IST.

As a young professor, Dr. Angsana doesn't have a fancy CV with a long list of publications. Nevertheless, I can tell that she is pretty knowledgeable. I feel very lucky to choose her as my advisor and work with her. I am her research assistant from the very beginning. She teaches me, trains me and cultivates me a lot and shows the right ways of doing research, rather than just simply assigning me some jobs while not paying too much attention to how to pull them through. That is something more than a relationship between employers and employee. I still remember some hard times in the first academic year and she is always the person I can fall back on. She gives me a lot of encouragement and compliment. I would say she is my advisor academically as well as mentally. For those who are considering applying IST and choosing advisors, believe me, Dr. Angsana is a good choice.