When I was still a high school student, I was always curious about what university students actually do. I searched online, asked teachers, asked seniors—bit by bit, these experiences formed a jigsaw puzzle that gradually assembled my imagination of university life. Now that I have spent one semester at National Taiwan University (NTU), that picture has become clearer and clearer. Even though I am already in university, I am still exploring, and it feels like there will never be a day when I fully understand everything. I hope this post gives high school students more concrete information—about choosing schools and majors, about NTU, and about the future.

Ever since I was little, I have carried the dream of becoming a physicist. In high school, I studied in the science program at HSNU, and for university I hoped to enter the Department of Physics. After considering many factors, I wanted to study at NTU. But my college entrance exam score only allowed me to get into NTU Bio-Industrial Mechatronics Engineering (BIME) or NTU Atmospheric Sciences, so at the time I chose Atmospheric Sciences, which felt closer to Physics.

But later I realized that entering NTU was absolutely the right decision. If you asked me today to choose between NTU Atmospheric Sciences and NTHU Physics, I would still choose NTU Atmospheric Sciences. In my days at NTU, I truly enjoyed spending time with classmates. There were talks hosted by various units across campus every day, and I listened to them with great enthusiasm. Seniors cared for juniors a lot, most professors were very good, and the overall atmosphere of the school was also healthy.

People often say that in university you can do the research you like, learn what you want to learn, and spend four years living your own life. I have to say: it still depends on the person. After only one semester at NTU, I have already seen all kinds of people. Some can study hard and play hard; some struggle on the edge of failing; some do nothing and ignore academics. I had heard such things from professors and seniors before, but seeing it in person made it feel even more real. Even though everyone entered NTU with roughly similar academic levels, the “M-shaped distribution” becomes more and more severe over time. But this is an issue of attitude. Attitude determines what kind of person you become.

Putting classmates aside, sometimes when I see seniors who always skip class, have bad grades, or fail many courses, I cannot help but feel a sense of regret. But there are also seniors who are strong academically, thrive in clubs, and even already have academic achievements. The same rice can feed a hundred kinds of people. You have to set your goal and persist.

University exams are very different from high school exams. Exam durations are long, but there are few problems. The questions emphasize thinking. So if you understand the lectures during the semester, or if you truly understand the textbook when you study, then as long as the professor is not one of those teachers known for writing extremely difficult exams, it is actually not hard to score around 80%. Under normal circumstances, the class average is also around 70%. For example, in my Calculus A and General Physics A, the calculus midterm and final were around 8 questions over 2.5 hours, and physics was 5 questions over 2 hours. You have around 20 minutes per question, which gives you time to think carefully. In high school, exams always emphasized calculation speed.

My General Chemistry, however, was very solid. The full score could be around 120–130. The exam covered a lot of content: explaining phenomena, judging situations, predicting products, and so on, rather than emphasizing computation alone. Having such a high full score is meant to allow people to get good grades without knowing everything, while still letting the exam cover many topics. Typically, if you understand the lecture, you can answer the questions. That said, at NTU there are also many professors who like to teach hard and test hard; class averages of 30–40 do exist. Basically, if you do not like one professor, you can usually find another professor offering the same course, so you still have agency over the kind of class you take.

I used to hear that university is four years of freedom, but I also heard seniors at NTHU and NCTU complain about being overworked. For two people taking the same curriculum, it really is possible to diverge into these two extreme outcomes. Setting aside those who completely give up on academics, let us only discuss people who do care about academics.

Assume you have 16 active hours per day. A week has 112 hours. Suppose you take 22 credits. Then you probably have less than (112 - 22) = 80 hours left for “free time,” because some courses have more class hours than credits (for example, labs: 1 credit but 3 class hours). Then suppose you spend twice the number of credit hours on studying for each course each week. You still have 80 - (22 * 2) = 36 hours left to use freely—about 5 hours per day. And usually, except for the two weeks before midterms and finals, you might spend even less time studying. So it is completely normal that some people can study hard and still have plenty of time to have fun, because time is simply abundant! Some courses require group reports. These do demand a lot of time and energy, but they still do not change the fundamental fact that you can have plenty of time.

This semester, the more “special” courses I took were Introduction to Atmospheric Science and Introduction to Bio-Industrial Mechatronics Engineering. These two courses are freshman requirements, meant to help freshmen understand what the department is actually about. Since I was in Atmospheric Sciences, taking Intro to Atmospheric Science was natural. I took Intro to BIME because a close high school friend studied BIME, and I noticed that course happened to be during a free time slot, so I joined it.

When I looked at department curricula while filling out my preferences after exam results, and tried all kinds of ways to understand departments, I now think those methods were quite inaccurate. To truly understand a department, you need to attend multiple courses in that department, meet multiple professors, and talk with multiple seniors. Only then does the real picture gradually become clear. Sometimes, observing with your own eyes is more real than hearing things secondhand.

For example: what are the real differences among BIME, Mechanical Engineering, and Engineering Science and Ocean Engineering? If you ask NTU students, I suspect even students in those departments may not be able to clearly distinguish them. If you look at their curricula, they are all engineering departments, and they all have a mechanical flavor; the content looks similar, and you cannot see clear differences. Department names are also unreliable. Maybe people only know that BIME can connect with biology, and they have heard of “bio-inspired robots,” but that does not explain BIME. BIME covers research in biomedical engineering, agricultural engineering, information engineering, and many other fields.

Electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, BIME… many departments at NTU work on robotics. If you only say “I want to do robotics,” you will not know which department suits you. A robot is like a production line: mechanical component design, mechanical structure, mechatronics integration, control, and then software design. This is a huge chain, and each department tends to specialize in different links. Almost no one can do everything alone. And I only came to truly understand which department is responsible for which link after a semester of exploration.

I think that even if you have already found your future direction in high school, the department you enter at the beginning is still only a reference. Without actually seeing and experiencing it, you cannot be sure you are truly suited for it. If someone gets a direct admission into Physics because they won a gold medal in physics olympiad, does that mean they will be forever intoxicated with physics? Maybe they take organic chemistry and discover that quantum mechanics applied to chemistry is even more interesting, and then they change direction. NTU is a comprehensive university, and it is precisely this kind of environment that allows us to gradually develop our strengths.

Before I entered Atmospheric Sciences, to be honest, I thought the department was simply about weather forecasting and analyzing typhoons. Strictly speaking, that is not wrong—but it is far too incomplete a description, because atmospheric science has many other interesting areas, even if they are not the largest fields. If you want to work in something related to atmospheric science, the obvious paths are the Central Weather Administration, the Civil Aviation Administration, research institutions, or private meteorology companies. I think people can guess these paths without even studying in this department.

But after one semester of exposure to Atmospheric Sciences, I understood more clearly what atmospheric science actually does. Beyond typhoons and weather forecasting, I learned what kinds of research are currently happening in the field. More interestingly, I discovered many atmospheric phenomena I had never even heard of before. Atmospheric science is a basic science, and the essence of basic science is exploring to satisfy curiosity. At the same time, what you discover can contribute to humanity—for example, understanding the relationships among parts of the global climate system can help respond to climate change.

Most Atmospheric Sciences professors do numerical simulation. They use “models” to run simulation experiments under different assumptions—for example, how irrigation water usage in California agriculture affects local climate, or how the ozone hole affects the global climate, and many similar topics. Some professors do observational experiments, analyzing data collected from things like ocean drifting buoys, radiosonde balloons, weather satellites, and radar echoes. Techniques that combine numerical computation with observational data are called data assimilation. The most common application is model forecasting, and it is also an important research direction in atmospheric science. Of course, some scientists do theory—for example, studying the mechanism of El Niño. If you want to understand what a discipline does, the most effective way is to look at what experts in that discipline are actually doing. Because I interacted with many professors and seniors in Atmospheric Sciences and BIME, I came to understand some of this. But this kind of understanding through firsthand experience is difficult for most high school students when choosing majors, so they can only collect as much information as possible.

After entering university, I feel that in addition to academic learning, learning how to get along with people is also important. Many courses are done in groups. Lab courses are usually in pairs. Chinese and English courses are often groups of five. Some general education or elective courses that require presentations or projects also use group work. You should never hold the mindset that you can do everything yourself, but of course you also should not slack off.

My observation is that NTU students are individually strong, but organizational ability is just average. In general, people are neither proactive nor passive. That is why having a leader in a team is crucial. If there is one relatively proactive and serious person in the team, they can drive the whole team and the atmosphere becomes very good. Conversely, if someone slacks off and no one speaks up, the whole team ends up as a tragedy. For me, I am very proactive, and I seriously want to do things well. Since everyone is from different departments and has many activities, time is often difficult to coordinate. So you have to keep negotiating. I would lead everyone to agree on a time. Sometimes people do not express preferences, and then you cannot even schedule a discussion.

A good team should divide responsibilities and collaborate; concentrating all responsibilities in one person is not good. Everyone has their strengths. But sometimes members forget or procrastinate, and then someone needs to remind them. You also need to continuously give each other suggestions to improve each part. Ultimately, it still comes down to attitude. The quality of a group report depends on your standards for the work. If you genuinely want to do the best, and you can communicate that idea to your teammates so everyone shares the same belief, then you can of course produce good results. I won awards for my English and BIME reports this semester, which is an example.

Time passes so quickly. A university semester is over in the blink of an eye. But I think university is an amazing environment. I had a very happy semester and learned a lot. I have always enjoyed the joy of learning, and university is an endless treasure mountain that allows me to keep digging and enriching myself!