Graduation is Not the End, But the Beginning

Foreword: The Starting Point of a Dream

I am an overseas student from Malaysia. Brimming with dreams and expectations, I came to Taiwan alone in 2019 to start my university journey. Time flies, and four years have passed just like that. Today, standing at the doors of the graduation hall, I look back on my university life, where every step was filled with challenges and growth. I want to share with everyone how I spent these four years and the interesting things that happened along the way.

Academics: From Unfamiliar to Leading

I studied in the Department of Interaction Design (Media Design Group) at National Taipei University of Technology (NTUT). This major primarily focuses on developing AR/VR and various human-computer interaction applications. It's worth mentioning that I graduated from a standard high school in Malaysia, without any vocational or technical background. Honestly, when classes first started, I couldn't understand the course content at all. Coupled with the fact that I was in a completely unfamiliar country, it was an incredibly tough challenge. I still remember that during the first semester of my freshman year, I stayed up until 2 or 3 AM almost every single night just to adapt to life in Taiwan and cram the necessary interaction design knowledge. But hard work pays off—by the end of the first semester, my grades were pretty good, and I even won the Presidential Award (Academic Excellence).

As semesters passed, I gradually adapted to life in Taiwan, and my academic performance was right on track. However, danger often appears when everything is too comfortable. Because life was so easygoing, time slipped away day by day, year by year—or maybe the pandemic just stole my time (excuses, I know). Before I knew it, I was a senior and had finished all my required credits. Like most students, reaching junior or senior year brought a profound sense of confusion: Should I start working right after graduation, or pursue a master's degree? If I work, what kind of job? If I go to grad school, what major?

I pondered this for a long time without finding an answer. It wasn't until I started my senior year internship and understood the industry's actual needs that things became clear. Ultimately, I decided to pursue a master's degree, but in an entirely different field (I'll save that for the next post!). Fortunately, I had consistently maintained my grades in the top three, giving me a significant advantage for graduate school applications. One of my proudest university achievements is graduating rank 2nd in my department (2/82) with a GPA of 3.99/4.0, along with multiple Presidential Awards.

Internship: From Confusion to Certainty

Unknowingly, my senior year was approaching, and panic started to set in. NTUT requires students to complete a 320-hour internship at a company before graduating. So, I went on 104 Job Bank and frantically searched for internships to avoid delaying my graduation. Here, I faced an even bigger dilemma regarding my future career path: an internship only makes sense if it aligns with what you want to do in the future. But just like everyone else at that time, I had no idea what job I wanted or what I was actually good at. This might be somewhat tied to the university education system itself.

University is an incredibly free environment—so free that you might not even know what you've learned over four years. Besides core requirements, you take general education classes unrelated to your major, and for electives, people naturally pick the easiest ones. By graduation, many just know they have enough credits, without knowing what hard skills they've acquired. Furthermore, university courses tend to be very broad, teaching only concepts and foundations; advanced or practical implementations are usually reserved for graduate-level courses. Therefore, after four years, it feels hard to connect with the industry because your professional knowledge is too scattered, lacking specialized skills and hands-on capability. That was exactly how I felt and the main struggle I faced when looking for an internship.

Since I didn't know what job suited me, I exclusively targeted "Software Engineer" roles. I figured that given Taiwan's industrial structure, engineers would have better career prospects. Because my background didn't touch hardware or semiconductors at all, I only applied for software internships—15 companies in total, if I remember correctly. The results were exactly as I expected: because "Interaction Design" barely scrapes the surface of traditional software engineering, tech companies ghosted me. Only a textile manufacturing company, which happened to be hiring software engineer interns for their IT department, got back to me.

Standing out among 51 resumes to secure a ticket to the Summer IT Camp hosted by the IT Department of Makalot Industrial Co., Ltd. wasn't something I could attribute solely to my interaction design major or GPA. I strongly believe the practical experience I accumulated through hackathons and competitions won me this opportunity. I am deeply grateful to Makalot for giving me the chance to officially enter the software engineering field. Alongside my fellow interns, I developed and maintained frontend/backend systems, databases, APIs, and Docker, deeply immersing myself in the fundamental knowledge of a software engineer. After the summer camp, I received a pre-employment offer and successfully negotiated a semester-long internship, spending a full year working as a software engineer intern. My entire senior year was dedicated to this internship and my graduation project. This experience made me realize that what I learned in university was vastly insufficient for the industry, which immediately prompted me to apply for graduate school to further my studies.

Competitions: From Ordinary to Extraordinary

What truly made my university life extraordinary was my experience in hackathons and competitions. With my professor's encouragement, I took my sophomore project and entered my very first competition—the 5G Mobileheros—and successfully made it to the finals. Making the shortlist on my first try gave me a massive sense of accomplishment. Throughout my junior and senior years, I frequently participated in various competitions and achieved great results.

Most notably, my team made the news when we won 1st Place at the Makerthon National Tournament, and we also secured the Potential Award in XR Social Welfare Development at Vision Get Wild. Furthermore, some of our projects were featured as case studies on the Institute for Information Industry (III) website, and exhibited across university campuses in Northern, Central, and Southern Taiwan.

Results Announcement

We waited until the opening ceremony of the Vision Get Wild exhibition to find out the results, which were also posted on their Facebook page. We won the Potential Award in XR Social Welfare Development!

Conclusion: Graduation is Not the End, but the Beginning

Looking back on this four-year journey, I feel immensely proud. These experiences have taught me countless truths about life and learning. I didn't join any student clubs during university, but my college life was undeniably vibrant and fulfilling. To end this off, here is the diploma I earned over these four years.

University life ends here...
Graduate student life, To Be Continued...