Stupid, but chill.
Taiwanese born between 1994 to 2004 are obligated to serve in the military for 4 months (it’s 1-year for those born before 1994 and after 2004). It is divided into 2 phases: the 1-month training phase and the 3-month serving phase. My experience in the training phase can be seen here. For the 2nd phase, we are assigned to various troops all over the territory semi-randomly. Each batch of soldiers in the training phase will have lots from different sets of troops, and for some reason, the lots for ours were all troops in Taichung, which is our hometown. What was crazier was that, there was quite some lots for the military hospital, which is arguably the best place to serve the 2nd phase.
Military Hospital
Despite the name, the military hospital serves all walks of life. It’s essentially a general hospital but with most of the staff, including doctors and nurses, being military officers. Most of them graduated from National Defense Medical Center, a med school in Taiwan.
There are many departments and offices in the military hospital, where we conscripts were assigned. The assignment, in theory, is based on skills and abilities, but in fact, it’s weird af. For instance, I was assigned to the Medical Quality Office, where I worked as a minion and sometimes helped with some administrative work. The bizarre thing is that, I am an EE major Econ minor with CS experience graduating from the best university in Taiwan, and apparently, the person assigned to this office in the previous batch was a med student from a T5 med school in Taiwan. How in the world were the elites in this small island assigned to an administrative office doing some minion works that even your 80yo grandma or your 5yo cousin can do?????
Life
We worked 8-5 in our assigned office. For lunchtime and out-of-work time, we went back to the dorm and did whatever we liked to do. Most of the people spent their time playing mobile games like 傳說對決. There was also a group of people who would work out together in the common room (中山室) after dinner. Personally, I spent most of my time studying Spanish, learning system design, and reading novels.
Food
The food there is a major complaint among the conscripts. It’s made in the kitchen of the hospital. Apart from us, it also serves the staff as well as the hospitalized patients I suppose. The quality is far worse than those that we had in the military training center. As a result, many people would have instant noodles or Uber Eats orders as a compliment, or straight out skip the provided meal, and only eat their own food. Breakfast is the most unacceptable among us. More than half of us never ate the provided breakfast except in the first few days.
Every Thursday night, some of us would order dinner together, sometimes pizza, sometimes fried chicken, and sometimes hamburger. It was pretty nice actually.
Working at the Medical Quality Office
I was in total cultural shock when I first learned of their works. There are still people living in 2 decades ago can you imagine.
Information transferring is still dominated by paper. Many of my works were scanning printed documents. Crazy isn’t it? The documents were originally printed from a digital file, yet they want to get the digital versions of the documents by scanning it. Crazy shit. Also, even though they have an internal mailing system, they still transfer documents by sending them IN PHYSICAL FORM IN PERSON! It’s called 送公文, one of my major works there. They would put the documents inside a physical folder (how crazy) with different colors indicating their urgency (red for urgent white for normal) and told us to send them to other departments or offices. How in the world is the tech of the boomer generation still here, alive and well?
If the 1-month military training made me realize that anywhere other than the military camp is heaven, working in the military hospital made me realize how fortunate and privileged I am to be able to become a software engineer doing relatively interesting and challenging work.
My Personal Progress
Apart from regular stuff that you do on your phone (e.g. social media, messaging), I mainly use my phone to do 3 things here:
- study Spanish
- read novels
- study system design
Spanish
For the first two weeks, I used Duolingo for general learning, Linguno for memorizing words with spaced repetition, and Language Transfer for some high-quality and easy-to-understand verbal Spanish lessons.
Then I discovered LingQ, which is an app that lets you import articles and books as well as read others’ imports. From my experience in perfecting my English, I know that the most effective way to improve is to expose yourself to the target language’s environment, whether it’s forums, Internet articles, books, YouTube videos, or TV shows. Even if you use spaced repetition to force yourself to memorize a lot of vocabulary, if you don’t use them, don’t read them, and don’t hear them, they’ll eventually fade away from your memory. Therefore, it’s crucial for one to put oneself into a steady state where one is constantly bombarded by the target language.
The problem for me was that, I was simply not proficient enough to understand those raw Spanish contents. This is where LingQ shines. If you want to read a book but you only know less than half of the vocab, no problem. Just import the book into it and then start reading. LingQ not only provides a built-in dictionary system, but also a flashcard system. Just click on the words you don’t know, check the possible meanings, edit them, mark their familiarities to you, and then keep on reading. The words of different familiarity would be in different shades of yellow highlighter. This makes reading a book much much easier.
Of course, you can also just enjoy the wide variety of courses made by other people. For the first month, I read the A2-B1-level courses made by other people. Later, after finishing El Principito (The Little Prince), I downloaded the Spanish translation of Stormlight Archive and import it to LingQ (have to use the web version). Within minutes, the whole book is imported and automatically divided into about 60 lessons.
My original goal is to reach B1, especially in reading. In the end, with the help of LingQ, I think I’ve achieved this goal. I’ve joined a random group mainly consisting of native Spanish speakers in WhatsApp and I can read most of their messages without any help. I can also semi-comfortably read Stormlight Archive with the help of LingQ’s dictionary.
Novels
I’ve finished 4 books during my 2-month span in the military hospital with Kindle on my phone:
I was reading Children of Ruin at first, but then I discovered Greg Egan, and diverted all of my attention there. I finished Axiomatic (collection), and started Diaspora right after. However, at about the halfway point, it was so dry and difficult that I found it hard to continue, so I switched to Brandon Sanderson’s Tress of the Emerald Sea as a break.
In the second half of Diaspora, I complement it with another entry from Brandon Sanderson, Dawbshard. In the final 2 weeks, since I really wanted to finish Diaspora and Dawnshard, I mostly focused on them and ignored DDIA.
Axiomatic (collection) and Diaspora are really amazing, Tress of the Emerald Sea is good in its own way, but Dawnshard is such a stupid YA style book. I do not recommend it unless you have all the free time in the world like I did.
I also read a couple of chapters of the long forgotten The Claw of the Conciliator (The Book of the New Sun 2) in the last few days,
Career
I started to read High Performance Browser Networking while continuing to read Designing Data-Intensive Applications (DDIA). DDIA is really fun tbh.
I sent a ton of applications for 2024 new grad roles as well, mainly just for testing the climate. Even if I got a chance to interview, I most probably won’t be able to since I can’t use my computer there, not to mention I haven’t touched LeetCode for years.
Misc
Interpals
Out of boredom, I searched for some platforms for making Internet friends with people from other countries, and found Interpals. It’s a pretty legit social networking platform. Kind of like a more complete dating platform, or like Facebook or Twitter with a matching feature. It’s fairly easy to have some meaningful conversations on the platform as long as you initiate. Unlike dating apps, many people on this platform write a lot in their bios, so it’s not hard to break the ice.
I have a total of 12 meaningful exchanges on this app, including people from the US, Indonesia, Australia, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Venezuela, Spain, Philippines, Turkey, and Paraguay.
The only complaint I have about this platform is that the Android app is absolute dogshit. It has a 30-second launch time, discouraging you from using it. The iOS app is fine tho.
Travel Plans
I also utilize my time to plan my travel plans in November, including booking hotels, tours and activities.
Overall
Though the 1-month military training is a literal hell, I actually rate my time in the military hospital as positive. The accommodation was okay, the food was bad but it was not my focus, the work was stupid but there was not much work, and most importantly, I read a lot of novels, improved my Spanish reading skills hugely, and read 230 pages of DDIA. I am certain if I was given 2-month of total free time instead, I would not do those things at all, but instead stay home playing games and maybe playing some football from time to time.