hirty female students from Shanghai International Study University (SISU), Japan and South Korea, participated in a series of online courses in the 8^th Asian Women’s Leadership Program (AWLP), with the theme of Women's Leadership: Insights and Impacts, which was organized from October to November 2022.

Five lecturers of the program are from three universities, SISU, Showa Women’s University in Japan and Sungshin Women’s University in South Korea. They have been working together to prepare lessons for the program since July 2022.

One of the lecturers, SISU teacher Zhang Yan said she wanted to take this opportunity to deliver some messages to students about gender equality and how women can make themselves stronger.

Program members took eighteen class hours of courses, which cover topics from women’s fashion and social development, outdoor sports and feminine consciousness, and women’s leadership cultivation. They worked in groups to discuss, exchange ideas and complete assignments.

Chen Dian, a program member of SISU, said that she and her Japanese and Korean classmates learned from each other in terms of software use and presentation of work.

Judy Cheng-Hopkins, a member of Global Women Leaders Voices and former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations (UN), invited by the program to engage in an intergenerational dialogue with students.

She shared her experience in the UN and explained her understanding of women's leadership. She emphasized that leadership is not a DNA thing, and explained that it can be acquired through practice, taking courses, getting tips from other leaders.

Each group made a presentation on a female leader at the ending ceremony and discussed with the lecturers the social challenges faced by women behind these stories and how to improve the situation.

Yu Yue, the student representative of SISU, said after this program, she realized that to be a good leader, an important thing is to have confidence in yourself. She also quoted a sentence that the lecturer said in class, "You are not confident because you are excellent, but you are excellent because you are confident."

The program was started by the three universities in 2014, which has been organized for eight years, except for 2016. It aims to focus on improving female consciousness of students, cultivate high-level young women talents, and promote cultural exchanges of young people in the three countries.

Program members selected from the three universities go to the three countries to study and practice together for three weeks. The program has been conducted online due to the pandemic since 2020.

The pandemic makes it difficult for university to carry out international exchange offline. To cope with it, SISU has explored the Internationalization at Home talent cultivation model, which relies on E-learning and is represented by AWLP, to cultivate innovative talents with global vision and strong skills in cross-cultural communication.