Universidad de Talca

Responding to a growing demand for quality education and academic excellence outside Santiago, the State created the University of Talca in 1981. Situated in the city of Talca, within the Maule Region, the University of Talca has been able to rapidly achieve prestige among Chile's best universities by focusing its research and teaching resources on its core academic programs. This academic emphasis has been complemented by strong development of the physical infrastructure and a particular interest in sharing artistic and cultural events with Talca's community.

The University has two campuses. The main campus (the Lircay Campus) is located in Talca, and offers the following programs: Law, Agricultural Science, Forestry Engineering, Business Administration, Accounting, Dentistry, Medical Technology and Mechanical Engineering, with complementary studies in the Humanities. A smaller campus is located in the city of Curico, 50 kms. north of Talca, and hosts Industrial Engineering and Computational Engineering.. The University also has three programs for graduate students: MBA, Master in International Business, Master in Educational Management and Policy, Master in Natural Science Education, Master in Horticulture and two Ph.D. in Natural Science.

Our internationalization efforts play an important role in the strategic plan of our university. The University of Talca is constantly working to become a truly internationally oriented institution, cooperating with a network of universities abroad. We find this essential today, in a world that is constantly changing, where borders are disappearing, and the distance between continents is shrinking.

To achieve our goal of internationalization, we have made a commitment to establish and expand academic cooperation agreements with foreign universities. Most of the exchange agreements we have include both teacher and student exchange, as well as academic opportunities for researchers. We have faculties and students from several foreign countries, among them Germany, France, Spain, USA, Canada, Colombia, Paraguay, Peru, etc. We do, however, want to increase the number of foreign students at our university, as well as the number of our own going abroad. In 1998, 24 students were granted scholarships, 12 of them in cooperation with the DAAD (the German Academic Exchange Service for Students) to go to Germany, and another 12 granted by our University for students to choose among a number of universities around the world. The agreement we have with most of them is that the selected students will keep paying fees at their home institution, and are accepted without payment at the host institution.