Before high school, I dreamed of becoming a physicist. After entering university, I gained a fresh perspective on the world. During freshman year, I attended talks in many places and took courses in other departments. Little by little, my interests in other fields surfaced. I could also feel it myself: compared with the academic path, I was more suited for engineering. In the end, I transferred—into the Department of Bio-Industrial Mechatronics Engineering (BIME).

As a side note, here is my answer for those who are seriously considering transferring into BIME. Even though BIME is not a “hot” department, I doubt any department would be willing to accept a student whose GPA is below 3. I took Introduction to Bio-Industrial Mechatronics Engineering in freshman fall and got an A+. My semester GPAs were 3.6 and 3.2. BIME evaluates applicants directly based on their academic record, so the higher your GPA, the better your chances of transferring successfully. From my experience, either an average GPA of 3.4 is enough, or taking Intro to BIME and getting an A+ gives you a very strong advantage.

This semester I took many interesting courses. BIME courses were quite fun to take. I also took courses in other departments, including “Introduction to Management Information Systems” in the Department of International Business and “Taiwan Electrical and Information Industries Forum” in the Department of Electronic Engineering at National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (NTUST). Every course had a significant influence on me—especially courses outside my department—whether it was the impact of new knowledge, expanding my horizons, or making new friends. I will set aside my observations about each course for now and talk about them in the next post. Here, I will start with other things.

In freshman year, I participated in GIS Taiwan (a series of talks). GIS taught me a lot and helped me improve from being a complete beginner. That experience made me feel that joining another large organization would be a great experience. Around March of freshman year, I volunteered at the NTU Green Collar Agricultural Market. During the summer, I saw that Green Collar was recruiting officers. GIS had just ended, and it was time to find a new “home”!

The Green Collar Agricultural Market is an organization under the College of Bioresources and Agriculture Student Association. It promotes agricultural knowledge and environmental values. It is called a “market” because its biggest event is a two-day agricultural market, and the whole organization essentially revolves around organizing that event. During the semester, there are also academic talks and various agriculture-related activities.

The interview process went smoothly. Lin Yan-cheng and I took on the position of Academic Team Leads together. This was Green Collar’s third cohort. The officers met each other and everyone got along well. People can be very different, or very similar. Everyone comes from different departments and different years, but we are all students in the College of Bioresources and Agriculture, and we all identify with—and like—the spirit of Green Collar. That is why we were willing to stay in the organization. This was what it felt like to be an officer in a university organization.

GIS Taiwan is centered around a series of talks, so its core is the Academic Department. Green Collar, on the other hand, is centered around the market, so the Academic Team is not the “highest-value” part of the organization. Even so, promoting Green Collar’s philosophy is still one of its goals, so the Academic Team remains important. The issue is that when funding is tight, it is hard not to question its value—this is indeed a problem in organizations that lack funding. When I was still in GIS, I often heard the Academic Director (at the time, Chen Yi-xin) talk about the process of communicating with other officers—especially around funding, which was always difficult. Now I finally understand what she meant. Green Collar’s budget was tight: the total budget was not even one-tenth of GIS. During fundraising and budgeting, people would also question us: why hold academic talks?

Talks exist to promote and share knowledge. Last semester, we hosted a series of three talks. From recruiting members in mid-October to the final talk in mid-December—plus midterms in between—the timeline was really tight. But in the end, we successfully invited all speakers. Each talk also attracted a number of working professionals. From my observation, no matter where the talk is, there will always be an older gentleman or a mom who grabs the microphone and starts giving thanks. Of course we ran into that too. For each talk, there happened to be an elderly lady who explicitly said the event was meaningful and thanked the organizers. In the eyes of younger students, it probably looked absurd: everyone was waiting to ask questions, and you were monopolizing the microphone just to say thank you? But looking back, it is a funny story. And besides, other than feedback forms, it is rare to hear the audience’s voice. It is even rarer for someone to personally say thank you. When someone says it into a microphone, you feel both anxious and happy at the same time.

Yan-cheng had spent a year in Green Collar’s Academic Team, and I had academic experience from GIS. Our views on organizing talks were broadly similar. I also liked Yi-xin’s leadership style from the past. Put simply, it was open-minded and free. So I mostly followed existing experience while combining it with Yan-cheng’s ideas. But there was one thing I could not replicate. Under Yi-xin’s leadership, I felt that GIS Academic had incredibly strong bonds and cohesion. When I led Green Collar Academic, I could not achieve the same effect.

Part of the reason might be that people join GIS with very high expectations. GIS is well-known; many talented people want to join and do something big, and there is a selective admission process. Green Collar recruits only within the College of Bioresources and Agriculture, and its visibility is far lower than GIS. People who join are interested, but fewer come in with grand ambitions. But I think the bigger factor is the difference in leadership. I could not make everyone feel passionate enough to dedicate themselves to Green Collar. Maybe my own ideals were not clear enough, so I failed to communicate the spirit of Green Collar.

In any case, the real main event would be the two-day market held in March next semester—and before that, the Academic Team would still have work to do! Next, I will talk about my job-hunting experience.

For some reason, I was not very motivated to study, so I wanted to go out and work. Early in the semester, I interviewed with a cram school that teaches LEGO-based classes. After I introduced what I had done for professors, they felt I would be fine. But the location was too far, and I realized I was not interested in cram schools, so I gave up.

Around mid-November, the idea of finding an internship came back again. Influenced by a course in the Department of International Business—and also because I felt I was always writing code—I wanted an internship with a different nature, such as marketing or data analysis. But as someone with an engineering background, it seemed that the only skill I had to compete in industry was still programming. So I started sending resumes for engineering internships anyway.

Through a job-matching platform, I applied to quite a few front-end engineering internships, because most of my experience was still in web development. But after applying to many companies, there was no response. I did not know whether they looked down on my background, or whether they had already found someone and simply ignored me. In short, each application disappeared without a trace.

Later, on the University Student Internship Matching Platform (it later shut down due to poor operations, lol), I saw that a Taiwanese fintech company was recruiting interns. The term “fintech” was extremely familiar to me—I saw it everywhere: in classes, talks, and magazines. If I could intern at this company, I could get hands-on exposure to fintech! So I excitedly applied and hoped to hear back in a few days, because my previous applications had been completely silent. The next day, when I opened my inbox, I found a reply. I was thrilled. The company’s VP emailed me to ask about my availability and whether I could use certain tools. I did not even care about class at the moment—I replied immediately. Not long after I sent my reply, I got another email. The efficiency was incredibly high. In the end, we scheduled the interview for the next day. From the time I applied to the time I finished the interview, it took only three days!

The next day, I arrived a bit early. The interview was with the VP and two engineers. At the beginning, I introduced what I had done for professors, to prove that I could code. After listening, the chief engineer said he thought my programming was fine. It sounded like I could be hired, and then we moved on to the job description. Perhaps because I was an intern, there was no test; I heard that full-time employees all have to pass tests. I have also seen how other companies interview front-end engineers. In fact, even though I can write some code, I am still just a beginner. If I were to look for a full-time job now, I would probably be questioned for not being capable enough. If I want to go to a big company like Google, I still have a long road ahead. Still, I was happy to get accepted. I went to eat a 200-NTD dinner nearby—normally, I only eat 50-NTD buffet meals!

At last, I had an internship. It felt like completing a small step in my life plan. On the one hand, I disliked studying, so I wanted to work. On the other hand, I also wanted to see how industry operates, so that if I start a company in the future, I will understand how companies run. The company itself was also a young startup, which made it an excellent reference for future entrepreneurship.

Working at the company was quite comfortable. There were endless snacks. Standing in front of a glass window, I could code while enjoying the view. Colleagues were also easy to get along with. Compensation was good too: the hourly wage was a bit higher than typical part-time jobs, plus many bonuses, and I could keep learning new technologies. The chairman also said that he hoped that by working here, I would learn things—of course, that was exactly why I came. My first internship really was a great find!

After joining, I needed to use the Angular 2 framework to develop the front end. I had no experience at all, so I started from scratch. But learning technology was much easier than studying. Coincidentally, there was an online event where you write technical articles for 30 consecutive days—the IT Ironman. I thought I should take this opportunity and write something about Angular 2 every day to force myself to learn. In the end, I completed a series of articles: Angular 2: 30 Days Toward Mastery.

One article usually took around 3 hours to write. Surviving 30 consecutive days like that was truly exhausting. To finish each day’s post, even when final exams were happening, I always wrote the post first and only then studied. During finals, I actually barely studied at all. And since I was also coding all the time on weekdays, finals were pretty disastrous. But surprisingly, my grades were all above B, which was kind of miraculous. No wonder people say that EE students cannot do EE, and CS students cannot do CS—maybe I am a BIME student who cannot do BIME! Anyway, almost everything that left the deepest impression on me this semester was related to writing code.