Members of the Integrated Systems Laboratory (ISL) attended Financial Management and Introductory Entrepreneurship, run by the School of Engineering, University of Phayao as part of its programme preparing students for internships and co-operative education placements. The course covers financial management, accounting, taxation and the basics of running a business.
Its own English subtitle, printed on the title slide, is blunter than the Thai: Engineer to Entrepreneur. That is the claim being made — that a graduate may end up carrying a business and not only a technical brief — and the School makes it before students leave for their placements rather than after they graduate, which is the only point at which it is still cheap to learn.
Part of this applies inside a university laboratory long before anyone starts a company. Research runs on money that somebody applied for, budgeted and then accounted for line by line. The Fundamental Fund grant reported on this site earlier this year is the visible half of that work; the proposal, the costing and the reporting are the half that made it possible. A student who has never read a budget usually meets one for the first time at the moment it becomes their responsibility.
Accounting and tax are not what draws people into engineering. They are, however, the terms on which technical work is allowed to exist — in a company, in a laboratory, or in a business of one’s own — and that is true wherever a graduate ends up.
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