Women's Day Sharing--My Path to Studying and Career Exploration

By chance, I had the honor to share with a group of first-year high school students on Women's Day at "TCS New Taipei City Exploring the Future International Experimental Education Institution" that as a biological woman, what challenges do I face in my career? How did you overcome it? I look back on my current life journey. To be honest, apart from the traditional expectations of society, I have not encountered any real gender difficulties. This may be because I currently work in small organizations or take on cases to make a living, so I don’t have many encounters. Reaching the promotion ceiling does not mean that a woman's education and job search journey will be smooth.

So, I thought, if I had any advice to give to myself in high school, it would probably be the following:

• Your parents' advice is just one path, and you can live your life.

• There is no so-called "replicable path to success". It is all other people's life experiences. Just refer to how others make decisions at every turning point.

• Stay curious and take the initiative to explore new things that interest you. Sometimes there is no need to set a goal, and the encounters along the way may bring surprises.

• Understand your strengths, areas of achievement, and areas of frustration through practical actions, and don’t forget to understand ways to “reboot” yourself (relieve stress).

I still remember when I was in high school. In the Taiwanese society where academic advancement was the dominant policy, I, like everyone else, aimed to get into National Taiwan University and spent most of my life studying. Rather than a lack of time to proactively explore your interests, the more fundamental reason is that you simply don’t know where to start. The goal of going to junior high school is to go to my first choice in my hometown, and the goal of going to high school is to get admitted to National Taiwan University, which has the highest scores in Taiwan, but what department should I study? For me at that time, this was a question that I could never figure out clearly. I was super afraid that if I chose the wrong department, would I not be able to find a job after graduation? What should I do with my life?

I've worked so hard, why can't I find the job I love and am destined for?

Although hesitant, I did not follow my parents' advice. In their minds, being a doctor, judge, or teacher is the best career, or being a civil servant is a stable and fairly good salary. The first three are respected professions in traditional Taiwanese society. When I was naive, I thought that because I liked traveling, I would definitely like to be a diplomat! When I got my wish and enrolled in the International Relations Group of the Department of Political Science, I discovered that this was not necessarily the job I wanted to do. So what should I do? In order to find a practical answer, I also organized an international exchange camp in addition to sports clubs, hoping to broaden my horizons; I did three different internships during my junior and senior years, working in NGOs and government. Institutions and start-ups are exposed to the world.

Then will I find the goal in life that I should move forward with? No.

My grades in college were acceptable and I was still interested in research, so I chose to continue my studies and get a master's degree in political science. But after graduating from the master's class, I thought I should find a job using the skills I have accumulated over the years - research. I worked as a researcher in three different institutions, but I couldn't find a place that suited me. Every time I changed places, the more I doubted whether my abilities were too poor, which was why I couldn't find someone who would accept me and make me feel a sense of accomplishment. organization?

Until now, I am still looking for the only path in life that belongs to me. I think there is an ultimate answer, just waiting for me to discover it.

Five years have passed since the year when I hit the lowest point in my life. Now I think: There is no one-stop dream job in life, and it is normal to not be able to find a vocation that is 100% certain . Rapid advances in technology have significantly changed our lifestyles and the job market. Rather than setting a goal early and then burying your head in the road, it is better to enjoy the process of exploring the direction and revise your path along the way, so that you can keep pace with the times and adapt to social changes and your own circumstances.

All your efforts will be rewarded at some point in time

After I went through a period of ups and downs after entering the society, I was fortunate enough to start a wonderful journey of more than four years at the Open Culture Foundation (OCF), and I gained a lot. It was also during this period that I gradually gained a foothold and began to think about what I wanted to do in life. What does work mean to me?

My opportunity to enter OCF started with the Sunflower Movement in 2014. I was still studying at the Xuzhou Road campus of the old School of Social Sciences at National Taiwan University. The protest site was only a few blocks away from my dormitory. In addition to feeling the atmosphere on the front line , what impressed me most at the time was seeing a group of people who broadcast live events to all corners of the world in real time. This group of people claimed that they were from the Zero Hour Government ( g0v.tw ) and were a group of passionate citizens who practiced open source culture. They were known as " "Writing Programs to Transform Society" is the motto of the organization, which regularly holds hackathons and launches many digital projects to deepen democracy and promote citizen participation. Although I knew nothing about the concept of open source at the time, I was deeply fascinated by the concept of decentralization and using technology to lower the threshold for citizens to participate in politics.

In order to have more time to explore this new world of open source, I chose to use g0v as my field for the journalism courses I took next and even the topics for my master's thesis. I explored open source culture and citizenship through participating in related activities, interviews, and reading materials. The connection between participation. From 2014 to 2016, g0v was still dominated by biological men and people with technical backgrounds. To say that I was not nervous would be to deceive myself. When I'm in a strange environment where I don't know anyone, and I still don't understand what everyone is talking about (all kinds of programming languages ​​​​are flying everywhere), I really need to establish a mental construction of active exploration in order to be able to persevere. I am very lucky to meet many noble people - participants who patiently explained g0v, open source culture and community operations to me; I have supervisors who support me in my challenge to study the phenomenon of citizen participation in g0v (I am the first person from the Department of Political Science in Taiwan to No one has ever written about the relationship between open source culture and democracy, which means I have to explore a lot of new things on my own).

Therefore, my relationship with open source culture since I was a student has given me the opportunity to serve in OCF. Although when I first graduated, I was pessimistic because I couldn't see that my efforts to accumulate internship experience would bring me immediate benefits in job hunting, and I thought that all my efforts were in vain. However, when I stretched out the time axis and looked at it from a macro perspective, I found that the path I had taken still had meaning. On the other hand, at OCF, I changed my previous mentality that I was only suitable for being a researcher. Here I started with basic project execution, and later advanced to planning project structure, making proposals with funders, and managing project progress.

When I looked back on my experience in preparing for a speech, I found that I worked really hard and always set goals that I wanted to achieve in a very planned way, but I was frustrated because I repeatedly fell short. So I think fate and luck also affect the options available to us at the moment. Therefore , I think the effort we put in is to strive for more options, giving us opportunities to get closer to the type of work we like, the way we live, and the things we want to get . This is my interpretation of "opportunities belong to those who are prepared".

Try more and find your niche in teamwork

How do you find your heart's desire? I still can’t say with certainty that I understand what I want to do! There is no answer to this question, and I now believe that it should be kept blank in order to have the motivation to move forward.

I think most of the work now requires teamwork. Even technical positions still require communication within or across departments. In today's increasingly sophisticated division of labor, instead of working hard to maximize all skills, it is better to understand what your strengths or areas of achievement are, and find ways to find a way to make yourself happy, or to realize yourself. Search for meaning.

Keep an open mind, interact with people from different backgrounds and broaden your horizons

The advantage of doing this is that in addition to absorbing other people's experiences to expand your knowledge, you can also learn from other people's feedback about yourself, what kind of impression you give people, and learn from it your own more suitable communication method. Unless you can wear a mask and act for a long time, I think you are happiest when you are yourself. The key is how to be yourself and get along well with others.

So what to do? Here are some things I’ve heard or done, and I’ve attached the resources I can find so far.

• Get to know different people and chat with them. School clubs in universities are channels for getting to know students from different departments.

• Participate in open source community activities, such as hackathon held every two months by g0v.tw , and volunteer in the preparation of COSCUP, the annual conference of open source people. Preparing for activities allows you to understand the key points of venue configuration and agenda design. These experiences can be mapped to skills in the workplace and accumulate practical experience in teamwork. During hackathons or participation in open source projects, you can choose what you are interested in. Theme: Understand how others come up with proposals? How to bring together people from different majors to work on side projects? You can even hone your skills and accumulate your own portfolio by contributing to the design, coding, copywriting and other divisions of labor in the project.

• Join a book club. The time and understanding ability of reading alone are limited. Finding a group of people who are interested in the same field to divide the reading and discussion can not only increase the amount of knowledge, but also have the opportunity to hear others explain the knowledge in the book with personal experience. Reading a book Books practice various skills. For example, I have participated in reading groups led by the dean of the Department of Philosophy for many years, which allowed me without the brain to think abstractly to have a glimpse of the profound world of philosophy; I have also participated in UX reading groups by myself, listening to people in different companies share what they have done. A theory of how past events respond to user experience.

• Intern, work-study or volunteer to gain practical experience. This is very intuitive, so I won’t go into details. Today a student asked me how to find internship opportunities? I have not heard of any website that compiles internship opportunities from all walks of life in Taiwan, so interested students still have to look for opportunities on their own. You can search for information on the official website of the company or NGO you are interested in, or you can google keywords such as "student internship". For example, I found that CakeResume has an internship section . Those who are interested in my former employer OCF can also refer to relevant information !

Analyze from actual experience what gives you the most sense of accomplishment (or frustration)

Ideally, I would usually reflect on the following aspects after accumulating a period of practical experience to clarify what I gained specifically during this period.

• Where do I feel most accomplished? For example, what I love most is the process of creating and validating. It is a happy thing to know what you really like. It means that you have goals to pursue and you also know what state you are in when you are doing something you like.

• What would frustrate me? For example, for me, it may be negative emotional stress, which will make me worry, behave abnormally, and even affect my physical and mental health. It is harmful to my work performance and myself, and my defense against this aspect is And a little lower than other aspects. Once you know what factors make you worse off, you'll have a better idea of ​​how you can prevent yourself from falling into it.

In order to prepare for my speech today, I am reviewing my experience from my time in college in Beijing to this day, and I will record these experiences by the way. To echo Women's Day, my position is that "gender cannot and should not be a limiting factor that limits us from realizing our ideal life." As for how to live the life you like? I'm still exploring! (What should I do in the next stage...)