I started with my undergraduate study in Taiwan and in National Chengchi University, Department of Journalism, which even today is among the top journalism communication schools in Asia. I started journalism at a time when Taiwan was very much a third world country. We took classes in news reporting, news writing, editorial writing, typeset procedures, how to write captions, and all that, which did not interest me very much. Then I started graduate study in Taiwan, also, to get my master’s and that's where I met my first mentor who is Godwin Chu who just returned from Stanford as among the first batch of PhD students from Wilbur Schramm in Stanford in the 60s. And he returned and taught the first class in Taiwan on mass communication and where I learned about theories, theoretical models, research methods, social survey, all the procedures which was eye opening for me. And when he knew of my interest in journalism, he said, if you're going to go overseas to study it's much better that you track your shift from journalism to communication, because your background is very much in the social science and theoretical world. You can shift to either sociology or psychology, and I was lucky enough to get a East-West Center scholarship in the 1960s and started my master's in Hawaii, which, of course, is really a different world altogether. Quite a large number of comparative research I did initiated from Hawaii although I carry that on to Asia to Singapore, and in some way Singapore played a key role in coordinating all kinds of research. So then I was lucky to be in two sort of key positions, crossroads between East and West. And both because in both cases, they were so minor. They themselves couldn't do much. You look at Singapore, you know, how much can we do about Singapore, I cannot talk about Singapore communication theory because we don't have one. But we are in a position to sort of align together to sharpen the kind of comparative perspective. We take it for granted in Singapore, but nevertheless, is a very important role we play here. As part of a deal, I was in some way entitled or granted opportunity to spend one semester in Columbia University. I was there for one semester, but that one semester taught me a lot. First of all, it was an exposure to among the top programs in sociology, literally dominated by structural, functional school. And after my master in Hawaii, again, I was lucky, I got a teaching assistantship to start my PhD study in Minnesota which again, is a contrast to New York. Minnesota at that time was, like all other Midwest Big Ten very much informed by Chicago School. And there I was exposed to ideas of sociology, and communication as a minor, by the way, so I couldn't run away from my communication background. At that time, In the 60s and 70s, two schools dominated: it’s the structural functionalism in Columbia and then its the symbolic interactionism from Chicago And both have an influence on me. Structural functionalism looking at social structure, symbolic interaction looking more into communication and meaning and so on, but comparing the two, I must say symbolic interactionism has a bigger impression on me, although I always have the other one back in my mind. When I study sociology, when I study in communication, I can easily crossover from one to the other without much effort and I have a bias that communication is so deep into sociology or into society into social life, they cannot be society without communication. I will say this awareness of the importance of communication is very much part of it.