In 2021, Pew Research surveyed people from 17 nations on what makes life meaningful. 16 nations ranked “family” first; respondents in Taiwan named “society and its institutions” as the top source of meaning in life.

Growing up in this cultural logic, I later joined a class of 400 students from 81 countries at my undergraduate institution, where values and identities clash and blend. I learned to translate that instinct into actions that strengthen community ties. Every project below widens someone’s access to opportunity.

1. Major Rep. for Student Government

During my term as the sole Major Representative for Legal Studies, I worked to reduce information gaps within the major’s student body. I launched the first digital catalogue of law course syllabi, decisively ending the steady monthly stream of “Does anyone have the syllabus for X class?” posts on the school forum. Each week, I emailed a curated digest of internship and research assistantship openings. I also hosted writing hours to connect underclass students with senior peers, fostering a culture of mentorship within the major.

The major policy goal during my tenure was to expand the university’s existing funding support for postgraduate applications, which covered the GRE and GMAT, to include SQE1 prep courses. This campaign was stalled by budget ceilings, but students still benefited from this project as I negotiated discounted course offerings from local SQE1 prep course providers and saw my proposal of a free SQE1 group prep course established in the subsequent semesters.

Executive Committee of the 7th Taiwan-America Student Conference.

Executive Committee of the 7th Taiwan-America Student Conference.

2. Taiwan-America Student Conference

Nine months into planning the conference’s seventh edition, the pandemic made an in-person summit impossible. Rather than cancelling the event, our team rebuilt the program for a fully virtual format that still delivered relationship building across the ideological spectrum. As the Fundraising Chair and a member of the Executive Committee, I singlehandedly secured USD 1,250 in donor sponsorships through targeted cold outreach. This funding enabled 4 need-based scholarships for participants, ensuring that students from various socioeconomic backgrounds could participate fully.

During the event, I hosted roundtables between Taiwanese and American college students and connected them to our industry leader mentors. I also designed and carried out a curriculum on social entrepreneurship in the sustainability space based on design-thinking principles.

3. Mentorship and Coaching

A common theme in my community involvement has been directing the expertise I gained from my experiences to those in need.

3A. High School Debate — After 2 years on the national English debate circuit in high school, I returned to coach for my high school during a remote university semester. I coached a team of 9 students, and I am proud that they went on to win 2 out of 3 final matches, defeating the reigning champion school and earning two best debater awards.

3B. Peer Mentoring — At my university’s Global Education Office, I served as a peer mentor for 26 first-year students, scheduling one-on-one meetings and advising their study away application materials.

3C. Youth Mentoring — During the onset of the pandemic in 2020, I volunteered with the Abu Dhabi Department of Education’s virtual tutoring program for primary school students. I dedicated eight hours a week over 3 months to help an underperforming tutee from a local school transition to remote learning. My efforts saw significant academic improvements from the tutee and were featured in the university program report.

4. Alzheimer’s Disease Buddy Program

As part of my service-learning course at the NYU Silver School of Social Work, I volunteered in NYU Langone Health’s experimental eldercare program for Alzheimer’s Disease patients. Throughout the semester, I provided 4+ hours of weekly companionship to a retired urban designer, enhancing memory and emotional well-being by rediscovering locations significant to the patient (e.g., childhood home). I also submitted weekly observational journals on the patient’s cognitive conditions, while indirectly supporting the primary caregiver through structured discussions.

Notion homepage of the Notionverse@NYUAD.

Notion homepage of the Notionverse@NYUAD.

5. Productivity Reframing Exercise

After spending some time competing at the highest level in my field, I realized that the answer to a question eluded me:

Among the top performers in each field, what, if any, differentiates between those who consistently win and those who don’t?

My formative years in college occurred when the tide of hustle culture was at its highest: it appeared that the prerequisite condition for success was a relentless dedication to perfection. However, it appears to me that too many people crash down before they succeed – discipline was evidently not sufficient to guarantee one’s progress towards a goal. There is a human cost to ambition in this equation.

Now, the sufficiency-necessity confusion above might be clear to anyone who has taken a logic lesson or LSAT prep, but to me this realization has been one of the pivotal moments that gave me a brand-new mindset on productivity. There are several other factors that go into becoming the top performer in a field – or rather, the best version of one’s own potential – beyond discipline and dedication to perfection alone.

Those other factors entail, if I may borrow from Joe Hudson (whom I later discovered on my introspective journey): regulating my emotional well-being, reframing my actions as choices, and adopting an iterative mindset.

  • Regulation of emotional well-being: instead of relying on willpower to power through negative emotions, I can learn to understand the signals each emotion provides.
  • Reframing actions as choices: the biggest gap in hustle culture is that it has no answer for maintaining motivation. By reframing my actions as choices that align with my desire to generate motivation and energy, I could avoid the depletion of my mental discipline during challenging conditions.
  • Adopting an iterative mindset: pace takes precedence over perfection. An overt focus on the avoidance of mistakes gives legitimacy to inaction, as “more planning” is also required (sometimes excessively so). I can break this cycle by prioritizing continuous action and learning from my experiences, hence steering my efforts towards my goal instead of excessive planning.

This personal inquiry culminated in a community project. In Summer 2022, six friends and I pondered a single question: could productivity culture be redesigned to center around emotional well-being instead of relying on a hustle mentality? Our answer became the Notionverse, the region’s first student-run club dedicated to student well-being, utilizing the popular note-taking app Notion.

Together we built a club launch campaign that drew 300+ signups within the first week (a fifth of the campus population). We designed a monthly workshop series that paired Notion workspace design with cognitive concepts like time-boxing, and featured diverse Notion templates our members use to organize their academic and social life. My own workshop focused on advanced inbox organization techniques. Participants consistently rated their experience as 5/5 across the entire series.