From Caotun to NTU — not a rags-to-riches story

I grew up in Caotun, a small township in Nantou County. About two hours south of Taipei, not well-known, not particularly well-resourced when it came to the kind of extracurricular infrastructure that helps students build the portfolios they'd later need for university applications. I attended Jhongsing Senior High School — a public school, not a top-ranked institution in Taipei.

I prefer the framing "cross-domain" to "rags-to-riches." The second version implies I started somewhere bad and arrived somewhere good. What actually happened is messier and more interesting: I started somewhere different, and that difference gave me a perspective that turned out to be unusually useful in a few specific contexts.

NTU: Political Science, Public Administration track

I entered National Taiwan University's Department of Political Science on the Public Administration track through a combination of academic performance and the individual review process — the new system I'd later spend years analyzing through EdYouth. The irony wasn't lost on me.

University gave me resources, networks, and the vocabulary for ideas I'd been working with intuitively. It also gave me a location: I was now someone from the south, in Taipei, at Taiwan's most visible institution, with a specific vantage point on the gap between how policy discussions happen in the capital and how they land everywhere else.

NTU Student Association — Student Rights Division

From 2023 to 2025, I served as the head of the Student Rights Division of the NTU Student Association. The work was practical: track complaints, run surveys, resolve grievances, block bad proposals. The logic was the same as EdYouth, just at a smaller scale — find the problem, quantify it, bring it to the right decision-maker with evidence they can't dismiss.

The GPA reform campaign collected over 4,500 survey responses — more than a third of NTU's student body. That made it very difficult for administrators to frame it as a fringe concern. We also blocked a proposal to raise dormitory parking fees ninefold, by showing up to the relevant committee meeting with comparative data from other universities and a clear cost-impact analysis for the students who'd be affected.

These aren't dramatic victories. They're the kind of institutional work that's invisible when it succeeds — which is, I think, how it's supposed to be.

New Taipei City Youth Advisory Committee

Since January 2023, I've also served on the Youth Advisory Committee for New Taipei City, the most populous municipality in Taiwan. This put me in a different position than EdYouth: instead of advocating from the outside, I was at the table — contributing to internal policy discussions alongside officials from education, social services, and youth affairs departments.

The perspective shift was significant. Sitting inside a government policy meeting, you see the constraints that external advocates rarely encounter: limited budgets, competing priorities, legal boundaries on what can actually be changed. Understanding those constraints made me a more effective advocate externally, because I stopped asking for things that were structurally impossible to deliver.

How background shapes strategy

The thing about coming from a non-central place isn't that it makes you disadvantaged — it's that it gives you a specific kind of information that people who grew up inside the system don't naturally have. When I ran EdYouth's surveys, I knew what questions to ask about the rural-urban information gap because I'd lived in it. When I advocated for policy changes, I could speak to policymakers in Taipei about what their decisions looked like from Caotun — because that was my actual experience, not a position I'd researched.

That's not a rags-to-riches story. It's a cross-domain story. And the domain I came from turns out to be more relevant than I expected to the work I ended up doing.