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Advanced Placement Economics and Modern World teacher Michael Conley doesn’t regret leaving the high-tech industry. “I was making money, but not enjoying what I was doing,” he said. “Here, I enjoy my work, but I make no money. I tell my students it is the greatest trade-off I ever made.”
Conley arrived at Lowell after he spent 21 years working in Asia, not only in the high-tech private sector but also in public service, most notably in a refugee camp at Thailand.
Conley studied abroad in Taiwan for 15 months during his junior year of college. During his study he went to Thailand for 3 months to visit an old friend of the family, a Jesuit priest, during the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday. He later took a leave of absence from school to work with the Catholic Relief Service and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for five months at the Thailand-Cambodia border.
Conley worked with refugees daily in two of the largest refugee camps in Thailand, mainly helping them complete paperwork for asylum applications in the United States. Most of the refugees were Khmer, and many others were ethnically Chinese and persecuted because are wealthy and educated, according to Conley. “After the Vietnam war, a guy named Pol Pot commanded a communist group called the Khmer Rouge, and he’s right up there with Hitler,” he said. “He killed two million Cambodians and just destroyed the country. So many refugees came across to Thailand.” He is still in touch with two of the refugees, who are now settled in Australia.
The experience furthered Conley’s interest in Asia and global public service. “I heard many stories of suffering and loss,” he said. “It woke me up to how fortunate I was. It was eye opening because I had never experienced poverty.”
Conley returned to the United States to finish his senior year at Georgetown and earned a Bachelor degree in Science. Awarded the Sun Yat-Sen scholarship by the Taiwanese government, he went back to Taiwan in 1982 to enroll in graduate school at the National Cheng Chi University, a political studies university he attended for four years.
An essay he wrote on the Taiwanese economic rise propelled him into the business world. Through an interview intended for his research paper, Conley became acquainted with the chairman of the computer company, Acer, Stan Shih. Conley was an employee and responsible for marketing.
For roughly 21 years, Conley worked as a high-tech businessman, helping U.S. computer and software companies like Spyglass, Nuance Communications and Acer sell computer and networking technology in Asia.
After raising his family for 14 years in both Japan and Hong Kong, Conley decided to move the family back to America because he wanted his daughter to go to a high school in the United States. “I thought it might be too much of a reverse culture shock if her first experience in the United States was college,” he said.
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