I got into the Department of Electrical Engineering at National Taiwan University in Sep 2019 and graduated in Jun 2023. There were a lot of ups and downs, but in the end, everything turned out to be okay.

Achievements

Here’s a list of things I’ve achieved during my college years that I’m proud of.

• academic paper accepted by an IEEE conference
• academic paper accepted by an IEEE journal
• went to another country for an academic conference
• Captain of the department football team
• 3 software engineering internships
• 3 full-time offers before graduation
• Taekwondo white -> black belt
• 7th place in Judo National College Games
• minor in Economics
• 191 credit hours
• learned skiing
• took the full set of Spanish courses (18 credits)

7 Aspects

Breaking down my college life, there were six main aspects. EE, CS, Econ, Spanish, Research, Career, and Activities.

Electrical Engineering - 97 Credit Hours

As an Electrical Engineering major, it naturally played a huge part in my college life. It was the single best predictor of my mental health. Over the years, I discovered that, the further I was away from the EE stuff, the happier I was.

As a mathematically gifted student with a huge interest in science and technology studying in a top high school in Taiwan. NTUEE naturally becomes my top choice when choosing what to study in college. I got in rather comfortably, placed in the top 50% of all the students admitted to NTUEEs.

However, even though I was good in STEM subjects, I had never been the best of the best. Instead of a master of STEM, I had always been leaning more toward a jack of all subjects. This already showed a bit during my high school life in an advanced STEM class, where 80% of my classmates were math geniuses. But at least I still had other STEM-unrelated courses to compensate for it. In the first two years of NTUEE, our schedules were almost always prefilled with about 20 credit hours of required courses, leaving us almost no space to choose other EE-unrelated courses. As a result, I suffered.

Even though I studied hard, my grades were so bad. And in some of the courses, I really felt like a fucking retard. No matter how hard I try, I just cannot understand wtf was Probability and Electromagnetism about. And for other courses that I at least understood what they were doing, for example, Electronic Circuits, Microelectronics, Differential Equations, and Signals and Systems, you were basically just doing mindless calculations 24/7, sometimes with calculators and sometimes without.

They were extremely soul-sucking, and most importantly, they were FUCKING USELESS. After two years of intense EE courses at the top school in Taiwan, the nation of semiconductors and IC design, you’ll learn exactly NOTHING apart from those arbitrary theories and useless engineering calculator tricks, meanwhile the students in your neighbor department, CS, can already pass FAANG or HFT interviews having learned advanced data structures and algorithms and handle production software engineering tasks having absorbed the art of programming.

In my junior and senior years, having completed most of the required EE courses, I got out of the torture, and I felt so relieved.

All in all, I regard NTUEE as a scam program. It provides close to no actual value apart from the signal from your degree. If I am given one word to describe the experience, it’s “traumatic”.

Computer Science - 43 Credit Hours

To say that NTUEE is a scam is an exaggeration, because the CS part of the program isn’t bad. The CS courses provided by NTUEE are basically a stripped-down version of those offered by NTU CSIE (the CS department of our university). They are typically much less challenging than CSIE’s versions but still give you a lot of CS knowledge.

Starting from the 2nd half of my sophomore year, I took a lot of CS-related courses, mostly from our department. I didn’t exactly breeze through them, as much as I wanted to, but even when I was stuck, it was for some interesting problems and things that I genuinely cared about.

I also feel like the curriculum of the CS is so much more well-designed than EE’s. From basic programming to Data Structures to Algorithms to Operating Systems to Computer Architecture to Computer Networks, everything is related. Learning one thing helps you understand the other thing more. On the contrary, the required EE courses are all over the place. There is zero correlation between “Introduction of Biological Sciences” and Electromagnetism. If I were to design the EE curriculum, I would at least remove half of the required courses. There is no reason to force us to study at least one course from every subfield in EE given that we have to choose one of the subfields to pursue our further study or career after all. Just let us choose.

Economics - 41 Credit Hours

I got a minor in Economics because it was very fun. It was also one of my retreats when I was in the torture of EE. The Economics curriculum is also very well designed, and they do not make tons of courses required but only the most essential ones, leaving you the freedom of exploration.

Economics courses are typically math-based but rather straightforward, unlike Electromagnetism. They are purely rational and logical, and you can find the underlying meaning in most of the formulas. Different from the EE courses, you can internalize those economics models easily, providing you with a great tool to analyze the world. Every time you see something happening in the world or around you, the economics theories you learned would pop up in your mind, giving you a deeper perspective. I really think microeconomics and microeconomics-based macroeconomics (i.e. no Keynesian) should be the required course for every department in every university. The braindead r/antiwork type of comments everywhere on the Internet with zero knowledge about how society works is driving me crazy.

Spanish - 18 Credit Hours

I had always wanted to learn Spanish because Messi, among many other football players, either speaks English or Spanish, and I already knew English. Unfortunately, in my freshman and sophomore years, with required EE courses filling up all of my schedules, I was not able to take any Spanish courses. In the summer vacation before my junior year, all the summer semester courses became fully remote due to the pandemic, so I seized this opportunity and took 6 credits of Spanish courses that would normally take you a year despite doing an internship at the same time.

In my junior year and senior year, I had more time to take courses that I was interested in, so I finished the rest of the 12 credits of the whole Spanish curriculum of my school in the final two years. In the end, I was still far from being able to understand what native Spanish speakers i.e. those Spanish or Latinoamericano footballers were saying, but at least I built some sort of foundation.

Research

This part is way too long so I moved it to a standalone post. But in a nutshell, the academia is a joke, for the most part. I joined two labs in the CS part of our department and published one IEEE conference paper and one IEEE transactions paper related to game theory and resource allocation in wireless communication as the first author while making zero actual contributions to the field.

Career

Rushpay Full-Stack Internship

In my sophomore year, I was so frustrated and confused by the EE curriculum. They all were boring af and I didn’t do well either, but I had a feeling that I was more interested in the CS part of EE.

When I was talking with a friend from the CS department he reminded me that there was this thing called internship, so I tried randomly applying for some, including a Microsoft one and some on a random internship matching platform collaborating with some governmental departments and small firms.

I was extremely unprepared and stupid at that time and I failed the Microsoft phone screen (just a get-to-know type of phone call actually) miserably. On the matching platform, I got interviews with two small firms and got the internship offer from both. One was about electromagnetism and the other about full-stack web development so naturally I chose the latter.

It was in the midst of the pandemic in Taiwan so it was fully remote. I had never ever met anyone in the company in person. And I think I had only seen the face of the CEO in the interviews. In the meetings no one opened the cam ever so I had no idea what the others looked like.

Rushpay was an extremely small startup, with only 1 CEO, 1 marketing, 1 backend, and 1 frontend FTE. The frontend was even the CEO’s wife I think. I stayed there for 6 months. Since it was so small I did a little bit of everything, from backend to frontend to CI/CD, tho their tech stack was super old and the infrastructure was super lacking compared to larger companies in retrospect. Their git workflow was also extremely stupid. They didn’t even know how to do feature branches.

As a result, although at that time I thought I learned a lot from the internship, I found out that that was a fucking lie during my stint in LINE.

Yahoo DevOps Internship

During the Rushpay internship, I became more confident about my path in software engineering. I finally studied how to write a proper resume and applied to quite a lot of internships, mostly for the summer before my senior year. See 2022-intern-apps for all my application details, but anyway, I got the offer from Yahoo’s summer internship and LINE’s year-long internship, and accepted both.

My Yahoo internship was an 8-week DevOps internship in a production engineering team. See Yahoo Internship Review for the full review. But the gist is that, I got to experience what the internals of a proper big US software company was like, tho I didn’t gain any technical knowledge. Still, I thoroughly enjoyed my time at Yahoo for the awesome office in New Taipei and the brand-new experience in a big US company.

LINE Backend Internship

After the summer internship at Yahoo, I immediately joined LINE, staying there for 10 months until I graduated and got into the military. The role was actually for one year, from July 2022 to June 2023, but since I already got the Yahoo offer before even applying for LINE I delayed my start date to Sep 2022. So it became a 10-month internship, still pretty long.

See LINE Internship Review for details, but in summary, although I did not like the culture, this experience did transform me into a proper software engineer writing quality production code with hands-on experience in the full software development lifecycle. So I am super thankful for this internship experience.

Seeking US Full-Time Offers

In the first semester of my last year, I spent a significant amount of time looking for new grad SWE roles in the US. Since I have US citizenship, I was thinking that if I could get an offer in the US directly, I’d just go there and skip the money-grabbing US Master’s that all of the other people in my school trying to work in the US would need to go through.

I grew my LinkedIn network from just shy of 50 connections to 500+ in 2 months while requesting a lot of referrals from alumni working in the big techs in the US. While I did get a lot of referrals, the big layoff wave hit and I ended up only getting interviews from 2 non-tech F500 companies. I passed both interviews since the bar was way lower than my skills and ended up going to one of them. Though the offers were so much worse than what I had envisioned (really thought I could get at least one offer from the big techs), I figured it was still way better than wasting 100k on a US Master’s. Besides, I also got admitted to an online part-time Master in Computer Science program at an elite US university which offered the exact same degree as the in-person version while costing several magnitudes less. My future company also offers tuition reimbursement which should be able to cover 100% of the cost so it is a no-brainer.

Activities

Football

I have been playing football since elementary, so naturally I kept on playing it in college.

EE Football Team

I was on the football team in our department (we called it NTUEE FC) the whole time. There were three very good players in the same grade as me in my freshman year, but afterward, the one from Spanish (or France) went back, and another two Indonesians joined the newly created Indonesian team in our school. So I became the best player in my grade and therefore became the captain of the team in my junior year.

Being a captain of this team was honestly more about being a manager than a captain. Most of the time I was dealing with collecting team fees, posting information on the team board, doing competition registrations, negotiating with other teams for training, and preparing for events. It was kind of fun tho.

In my freshman year, with the three exceptional freshmen and some great older players, we were actually a really strong team. But afterward, the quality and the effective number of the squad just kept dropping and dropping. The average number of effective players (those who played regularly) in each grade was actually two, which was very sad.

In my final year, we actually had a bit of resurgence thanks to the World Cup. But I didn’t participate a lot because of my internship. Hope the kiddos can make the team great again.

School Team

In our school team, everyone can join the training at the start of the school year for the first month, and during the month the coach will select the 30-man squad.

I joined the training when I just got into the school but unfortunately, I didn’t get selected, and rightly so. They would select the more senior players if two have similar qualities because the younger one still has a chance later on, so you need to be really really good to be able to be selected in your freshman year, and I wasn’t.

I didn’t join the training in the latter 3 years because I went to Taekwondo and Judo instead. So that was the end of my school team journey.

Taekwondo

Learning Taekwondo has always been my dream since I was a child, but my mom didn’t let me learn it then because she heard that stretching too much would disrupt your growth. So as soon as I got into college, I joined the Taekwondo club in our uni because firstly my growth had basically stopped and secondly there was no one to stop me. The club fee was only a few hundred NT dollars so it wasn’t like I needed to beg my parents for financial support.

For the first two years, it was pretty fun. Although we only trained actual human-to-human fighting with full equipment like one time a semester, I found kicking the targets more fun tbh. It was just so satisfying when you kicked the target strongly and loudly.

But in the third year, it had become stale. A big part of the reason was that I was aiming to get a black belt then and practicing “Poomsae”, which was a set of arbitrary movements that you’ll never use in a real Taekwondo fight, was extremely boring and soul-draining.

Apart from that, the regular kicking practices became less fun as well. So in the third year, I only went to the club occasionally. In the summer before my senior year, I finally participated in the black belt exam and passed, and I never went to the club afterward.

If COVID wasn’t there, I could actually get the black belt in merely two years. That just shows how arbitrary those promotion exams are. In my opinion, it’s just a money-grabbing scheme.

Judo

See my full journey here.

In my sophomore year, I took the Judo course because the names of the waza (techniques) sounded really badass, like 大外割 (Osoto Gari), 小內割 (Kouchi Gari) etc.

The teacher in the course promoted the Judo club a bit so I checked it out, and immediately became a regular. What they were doing in the club was much more advanced and useful than what they were teaching in the course, and as a kid, I always loved to roll around and jump and fall randomly on the bed and Judo was actually a lot like that, so I kind of found my calling.

I then won the tiny intra-club tournament for the first-time joiners (out of three people in roughly the same weight class) at the end of the semester, and participated in the National Intercollegiate Athletic Games at the start of the next school year (it was supposed to be at the end of the 2nd semester but it got postponed due to COVID). I won 1 game and lost 2 games in that tournament, ending up in the 7th place among 23 people in my weight group.

After the tournament, I joined the training less and less due to how intense the sessions were and some lab courses occupying the same time slots.

Although it lasted only for about 1.5 years, it was truly an incredible experience. I genuinely had no idea what Judo was about before, but after learning both Taekwondo and Judo, I concluded that Judo is certainly much more useful than Taekwondo.

Departmental Activities

Since our department is a very big department by number in the top university in Taiwan (also the largest one by student count), there were a couple of events and activities within our department. I wasn’t the most active but I did participate in a couple during the first two years.

NTUEE Night - Locking Dance

Almost all departments in our uni would hold a “night” each year, consisting of dancing, acting, and other shows. .typically held in an auditorium.

I joined the freshman locking dance group and we practiced one or two times each week, only for the event to be cancelled due to COVID. We then unofficially moved the event to be held in the outside area of one of our department buildings at noon.

I felt like locking was pretty easy to learn but quite hard to master. In order to perform well you’ll need to execute a lot of details perfectly.

NTUEE Symphony - Poster

I joined the marketing department of our department association and another member and I created the poster for NTUEE Symphony together. TBH I was really not good at 2D design, another member was the major contributor to the project. Still, it felt really good when I saw the posters in the department buildings.

Video Creation

I started to get involved in video shooting and editing in high school. Me and a few classmates created a couple of videos for the research presentation of our class and tho a lot of them were really cringy, some others were pretty good. Since then, I have been seeking every opportunity to create videos.

For the NTUEE Night mentioned earlier, I also created a promotion video with another marketing department member. It was honestly pretty bad imo, and I didn’t have the best time working with the other member.

In NTUEE Camp, a one-week camp we held annually for high school students to learn more about our department (which was a lie, most of the time they were just playing mindless social games). I joined the video creation department and created a couple of videos, including a promotional one and a few educational ones. I always perform the best when I am working alone and have total control over the editing process, and as a result, all the videos I created were really good. The promotional video was a banger and everyone was laughing so hard when we held a test screening inside our own department. The educational ones were of really high quality as well, from the subtitles to the transitions to the background music to the special effects. I have a hard-on every time I watch those videos.

It was a shame that the camp was cancelled due to covid as well.

Here’s the link to the videos I created or was involved in for the NTUEE Camp.

NTUEE Camp - Fire Dance

Apart from video editing, I also joined the fire dance group. Fire dance was cool af. Dancing with a long club was already fun, and now it was a fire.

Fire dance really isn’t very dangerous. There were times that the fire swung over my clothes, touching them a bit, but nothing happened.

To train, we had to ride a bike to a practice area beside a river while carrying our clubs, and it was honestly such a great experience. We rode on a riverside biking lane surrounded by water and green fields, and it was so beautiful, particularly in the dusk.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get to perform in front of real crowds due to COVID. But we already spent so much time training so I already had enough fun tbh.

NTU EECS Festival - Football

As the captain of the EE football team, the football game of the annual NTUEE EECS Festival, a series of games for the EE and CS students, was led by me.

Apart from the usual football game stuff, I went into full creative mode in preparing the prizes with a very sufficient amount of budget.

For the 1st and 2nd place, the prize was a World Cup and a Ballan d’Or trophy respectively. The fake Ballan d’Or trophy was okay but the fake World Cup trophy looked really legit. It was pretty heavy as well.

For the third place, I got a customized medal from Shopee.

The execution was quite perfect. The glass also felt really high quality.

There were 6 teams in total. 2 of them were from the CS department and the rest 4 were from the EE department, where 3 of them were from NTUEE FC.

The vibe was quite good. Everyone was having fun. In the semis and the finals, there were lots of penalty shootouts, and they really brought the atmosphere to the next level, as if it was a legit competitive match. In the end, all of the top 3 were from NTUEE FC, with my team being the champion.

Overview

Overall I have a decent college life, tho it would have been infinitely better had I chosen CS instead of EE for sure. I strongly recommend anyone against studying EE unless you’re 100% sure. It is incredibly time-consuming and boring and soul-sucking and draining and meaningless.