Taiwanese adventurer Chen Huai-Pu, supported by the Argo Yacht Group, collaborated with three international teammates from Sweden and Germany to embark on a sailing journey. On Christmas Day last year, they set sail from Africa and, after 47 days of perilous navigation across the North Atlantic, achieved a remarkable feat for Taiwan’s maritime history. The Argo Yacht Group issued a press release today, stating that on December 25, 2024, Christmas Day, Chen Huai-Pu departed from the Canary Islands off the coast of Western Sahara, Africa. Together with his three international teammates from Sweden and Germany, they sailed a 36-foot yacht in an attempt to cross the North Atlantic. After 47 days of a thrilling and challenging voyage, Chen and his team successfully completed this near-impossible extreme adventure, marking a glorious milestone in Taiwan's maritime history.

In the second semester of the 109th academic year, Professor Li Jianmo offered a service‐learning course in which he led us to volunteer with the “Shoes for Souls” Association, collecting and sorting used shoes and clothing. During our service, we learned that the association was facing a big challenge: in Kenya, where they provide medical care for jigger (sand flea) infections, they had been recording patient data by hand on paper in the field, then returning to the office to enter and organize it all manually—an extremely time‐consuming, labor‐intensive process. Two especially dedicated students volunteered to help: drawing on their expertise in electrical engineering, they wrote a mobile app so that social workers could enter case records on a tablet directly in the field. After months of hard work and many rounds of discussion, the system was finally completed and went live in the summer of 2021 at the Shoes for Souls service sites in Kenya. We are very proud to have contributed our bit to this international volunteer effort.

Due to NTU’s internationalization policies and the government’s New Southbound recruitment initiative, an increasing number of Muslim students are coming to study here. Zhang Qixian, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical Engineering, not only pursues her own research but also seeks to foster a caring, altruistic campus environment. Here’s how she has taken action to promote a Muslim-friendly NTU.