The TSMC Education and Culture Foundation dedicates itself to nurturing talent and provides diverse platforms to help youths discover their potentials. Among the multiple initiatives in such efforts, the TSMC Udreamer project has reached its eighth year since its first launch. The theme of this year’s Udreamer project is Planting a Seed of Dreams. In addition, this year’s pilot project also responds to the call for protecting biodiversity on land, the 15th goal of United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Foundation holds a special exhibition with the theme of “I have a dream: a tropical botanical garden to the world,” which encourages college students to plant the seeds of their dreams as the seeds will eventually sprout with consistent efforts. This year’s Udreamer project has attracted 180 teams that are formed by 559 students from 62 colleges to sign up and submit their entries. The number of students entries and teams has reached the historical high. At the final stage, nine teams have won the prizes and are awarded a grant totaling NT$ 3 million to kick start their dream-building journey.

Curating Pilot Projects to Help Students Pursue Their Dreams

The proposals submitted to the eighth Udreamer project are diverse and have an outlook on international collaboration. For example, a team proposes to work with local schools in Africa’s Malawi to solve the school dropout problem, while another team plans to make a satellite to participate in the Latin America Space Challenge (LASC), the world’s second largest space challenge, to achieve international exchange and cooperation. This year, the Foundation also launched a pilot project and invited the popular botany science writer, Wang Rui Ming (also known as Fat Fat Tree), to be the representative of Udreamer, who curated an exhibition of his dream tropical botanical and cultural garden at Sun Yun-Suan Memorial Museum. The exhibition has organized a series of events, including tour guides on botanical ecosystem, five themed talks, and two days plant market fairs. The exhibition offers students more inspiration and encourages them to take the first step on their dream-building journey. Also, the exhibition allows the general public to learn more about the tropical rainforest in Taiwan, which has attracted 4,856 attendees in total.

The TSMC Education and Culture Foundation aims to inspire more young students to pursue their dreams. The Foundation will continue to invest resources and deepen the content of TSMC Udreamer project to encourage students to care about and be passionate about sustainability issues. Through concrete actions and the development of competencies, the Foundation hope to create shared value and a better future.