Mungenast, whose undergraduate focus was in Chinese History, lived in China for three years as a UI student, first during his senior year in 1980, then in his first year of graduate school, and then again in 1987, when he attended law school in China.

But it was Mungenast's first experience with China that he remembers having the most dramatic impact on his understanding of the world and his place in it.

Mungenast attended Fudan University in Shanghai in 1980, the first year that China permitted foreign students to enroll in its universities. And although foreign students had been admitted, there was no formal program for them. Courses were taught exclusively in the Shanghai dialect of Chinese by the elderly faculty who had been educated prior to the Cultural Revolution.

But life outside of the classroom played as much of a role in Mungenast's education as his courses did. China was still a desperately poor country then.

"Shanghai was the wealthiest city in China," he recalls, "and even so the poverty was unbelievable."

But even the poverty in Shanghai did not prepare Mungenast for what he found in the Chinese countryside. "We students used to say that each hour outside of Shanghai was like traveling a century into the past," he remembers. "First the electricity stopped, then the running water, and then finally, no glass in the windows."

Interacting with the group of Shanghai and the Chinese countryside served to completely change Mungenast's world view.

"Coming from the U.S., I always assumed being poor meant degradation," he recalls. "Now I saw that people could be materially poor but live decent lives. That was the greatest thing about going to China for me - it turned my assumptions around 180 degrees, assumptions I didn't even know I had!"

Last summer Mungenast returned to Shanghai and the Fudan campus. "I couldn't believe it. There was a huge American studies building, a beautiful new dorm," he recalls. "It was a completely different place!"

Mungenast, currently the CEO of the staffing, management and communication firm, Creative Communications Concepts of the Gogalak Corporation, based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, remains active in Asia-related activities on the UI campus.

"I want to encourage other UI students to have the experiences abroad that I did. I want them to find their assumptions challenged in the same way."

(featured in the 2005 Department Newsletter )