It has been a long 2 months, but I'm back from my internship in Taiwan. I thought I would document my experiences, thoughts, and takeaways from my internship there.

Table of Contents:

1. Context
2. Oh No, What Do I Do Now
3. Arriving in Taiwan
4. Accommodation in Taiwan
5. Living in Taiwan
6. Tips for Living in Taiwan
7. Would I Live Here? Probably Not
8. Takeaways

Context

I was a year 2 student freaking out about getting an internship for the summer holiday. During my year 1 summer holiday, I did absolutely nothing and slacked off. And I loved every minute of it. However in year 2, I felt obligated to do something productive with my life, and not bum around all day. As a CS student, internships are what gives you an edge over others. And in this day and age, every student has at least one internship under their belt. I didn't want to lose out. Thus began my search for an internship.

The Search

I spammed my resume at LinkedIn, my university job portal, and InternSG for weeks. However I did not even get a reply back. One company did get back to me, but it was for an insurance internship. Or as they liked to call it, a financial services internship.

A mini-rant about how scummy insurance companies are

Can I just go off on a tangent here and say how deceptive these job postings are? They title it as a "Finance Internship" but its basically grooming you to sell insurance. They know that "insurance" is a dirty word, so they repackage it as "financial services". Wow they're just targeting gullible young people into being an insurance agent.

Also I don't care that I used block quotes to go on a tangent. Bite me. Anyway I digress.

I attended the financial services internship interview, but the whole thing felt like a giant red flag to me. Anyway they didn't follow up with me after the interview, which is a good thing I guess. But there was an intrusive thought that I was so terrible that even an insurance company wouldn't want me. I was quite close to giving up on my search and just bumming around for the summer holidays.

Halfway through my search, I saw an email blast in my university email, advertising an overseas internship during the summer period. I thought: why the hell not, just give it a try. I applied for it, and after a couple of interviews, I managed to secure an internship with a Taipei-based software company. Hooray.

As you can see, my long list of summer internship applications in a handy excel sheet. I think compared to other people, my total number of applications isn't that long, but it felt long to me. I would say my success rate of approximately 2%¹ is pretty good, since I've heard of others sending literal hundreds of applications and only getting 1 or 2 offers in return.

Oh No, What Do I Do Now

My initial happiness at securing a summer internship was very quickly washed away by the dreaded feeling that I didn't know what the hell I was getting into.

Concern #1: Zero Working Experience

I have heard local horror stories about terrible supervisors, bad working environments in Singapore, and here I am going to a completely foreign working environment. I have absolutely no experience working in a tech company, let alone a foreign one. I was terrified of making workplace faux pas and getting shunned by my foreign colleagues. But hey, there's always a first time for everything, right?

Concern #2: Language Diff

I've been to Taiwan before, but that was 7 years ago, and only on holiday. I didn't think I would be able to survive 2 full months living in the place. For starters, everyone speaks/writes Chinese. I would like to think my command of the Chinese language is adequate, but let's not kid ourselves. I would freeze up like a cat encountering a cucumber while trying to order something in Chinese². Not to mention, they write in Traditional Chinese (繁體字) which would make my life even more difficult. I can barely read Simplified Chinese at a professional proficiency, and now I have to read it in Traditional Chinese. I am so dead.

Some Hopium

Those two concerns aside, I was actually kind of excited to do an internship. The role was a frontend engineering intern, so I figured I could apply the skills and stuff I learnt in my software engineering module IRL to a workplace environment. Plus, I need to get out of my comfort zone and experience a different culture. That's what I told myself, huffing huge amounts of copium, as my departure flight loomed.

I was also very lucky to have another NTU student doing an internship at the same company, and I knew him from NS! For the sake of anonymity, I'll call him Lawrence. His presence was very assuring as I knew I wouldn't be alone at least.

Arriving in Taiwan

When I first touched down, I was pleasantly surprised by how comfortable I felt here. The metro system is very similar to Singapore's MRT, and I could safely navigate my way around the place. It felt like I was still in Singapore, just that everything is in Traditional Chinese.

Accommodation in Taiwan

I was fortunate enough to get my accommodation near my workplace. Like ridiculously near, like 3 minutes walk away near. It is a shared accommodation place called Banana Coliving, and the rates are relatively cheap compared to other accommodation I've found. Personally, I don't mind sharing a room with other people, since I'm not gonna spend most of my time inside there. Fortunately my roommates were very chill, plus Lawrence was bunking with me in the same room. There was free air-conditioning, unlimited use of the utilities like gas and water, and free wifi. All in all, it was the best possible choice for me living in Taipei. In the future unlikely event that I have to live in Taipei again in the short term, I would likely choose Banana Coliving again.

Living in Taiwan

I'll split this down into several aspects.

Food

The food here is really good and cheap. Taiwan has their own form of 菜饭 called 自助餐, where you can essentially pick and choose your own dishes and pair it with rice/soup. And it's quite cheap too.

This whole bunch of food was about $6 in total. Plus we can get unlimited drinks. Quite value.

I'll also like to mention the signature Taiwanese chicken chop. This entire meal is only $6, that's absolutely bonkers.

Places to Visit

Taiwan is quite a popular tourist attraction for a good reason. I went to the typical tourist attractions during the weekends such as Taipei 101, Beitou Hot Springs, Ximending Night Market, and others.

A Special Shoutout to PC Cafes

While tourist attractions are nice and all, I actually spent most of my weekends at the PC cafe. I just want to say that these PC cafes are so GOATed. You get access to an i9, RTX 4070, 32GB RAM, beefed up PC for only $2 per hour during the weekends. In Singapore it would easily be thrice that amount. Furthermore, you can order food and they would serve it to you at the booth, which means you never have to get up from your seat apart from toilet breaks. You can theoretically live here forever if you have enough money.

Work

Like I've mentioned before, I had zero working experience in the tech industry. Apart from working part time as a temperature screener during the COVID era, I hadn't worked in a proper job before.

I was understandably very nervous on my first day. From terrible supervisors to snarky colleagues, I was prepared to face the worst. But I was very surprised to see that it was the complete opposite. My supervisor was very chill and didn't really give us a timeframe to complete our tasks, and the colleagues were chill.

I was introduced to their development workflow using Jira and Bitbucket to track their development progress and version control. I worked on editing their software for a bespoke version used by Dior JP, and seeing my work being showcased on their website made me feel very accomplished!

I worked on migrating a part of their application from Vue 2 to Vue 3, and that was kind of nightmarish to do. Mixins are terrifying.

And finally, my magnum opus of my internship, I created an AI chatbot utilising AWS Bedrock, Transcribe, and Polly. It was a very fulfilling experience creating a product that was actually usable in a practical context.

Overall, working here was a very enjoyable experience, but then again I'm only on an internship, if I work here full-time it might be different.

Tips for Living in Taiwan

After spending 2 months here, I learnt a few tips for people who are living here short term.

• Get a Taiwanese phone number.

With it, you get access to the LINE superapp. If you thought Grab could do almost everything, the LINE app in Taiwan beats it by a large, large margin. Not only can you pay for almost everything in Taiwan, you also get access to their streaming service and news app. Plus there's even a TikTok clone built into the app. It's insane. In general, it's good to get a Taiwanese phone number regardless.

• Know some of the lingo.

In Singapore, if you want to eat in or takeaway, you'll typically say 吃 or 包. But in Taiwan, they say 内用 or 外带. This is an important distinction to make. I told them I wanted to eat in by saying 吃 and they looked at me like I was an idiot.

There are also some slang that Taiwanese people use such as 污口林 that you just have to get used to. In this case (as GPT 4o helpfully explained):

污口林 (Wū kǒu lín): This is a playful or colloquial way of saying "污蔑" (wū miè), which means to slander or defame someone. "林" (lín) is often added as a suffix to sound humorous or light-hearted.

Also, when the cashier asks you if you would like 载具, they're referring to a system of saving your receipts in your phone by scanning a barcode. This system stores your receipts in the cloud, and it apparently helps with your tax filing. There's also a lottery system where the winning numbers could correspond to your receipt number, which encourages you to keep all your receipts.

• Cycling culture is really good here.

In Taipei, there's a citywide shared bicycle system. It's very similar to the system Singapore had a few years ago, but in Taipei its very prevalent. There are dedicated cycling lanes at the sidewalk, and Google Maps has a cycling option when getting to places, plus they even track the bike stations, along with their availability of bikes and parking lots. Singapore could really learn from this!

• People drive on the right here. Also everybody jaywalks.

You'll get used to this, but I had to spend the first week correcting the way I turn my head before I cross the road. Jaywalking culture is ubiquitous, there are people jaywalking literally in front of a police station and no one cares. Also, zebra crossings don't mean anything, DO NOT expect the cars to stop for you.

Would I Live Here? Probably Not

After spending 2 months, I was actually considering whether it was viable to live here i.e. migrate to here. After thinking about it, I decided against it. Here are some of the reasons why:

• The pay is low

My supervisor shared with me the pay ranges for a software engineer, and its really low. The salary range for a senior engineer here is the same as the starting salary for a software engineer here in Singapore. The cost of living here, while cheap, is definitely not half of Singapore's. Ultimately, I would be earning a lot less in Taipei than in Singapore.

• The sewage system here is shit (literally)

In the workplace and the PC cafe, there is a big sign in the toilet cubicle warning us not to flush toilet paper down the toilet. This is because up until a few years ago, Taiwan's sewage systems couldn't actually handle toilet paper and it could clog up the pipes. Nowadays, the problem is supposedly solved, and that you can safely flush toilet paper down the toilet bowl. But many people still throw their soiled toilet paper at a dustbin inside the cubicle. It is really disgusting seeing the dustbin fill up with soiled toilet paper next to me. And even though they claim the sewage system works just fine, I still occasionally smell the stench of sewage in the air while walking through the city. I cannot stand the smell just lingering around. I wouldn't want to live in a place like that.

• China is still threatening to invade

Honestly, this is the biggest and only reason why I wouldn't consider living in Taiwan even if the above two reasons were addressed. The ramifications of such an invasion coming to fruition is too great despite the very minute possibility of it happening. I cannot risk living in such a place where China openly posts propaganda of dropping bombs on Taiwan. Watching these videos in Taiwan is really scary, and it is a fear that I never thought was relevant until now.

Takeaways

After spending 2 months here, I've certainly learnt a lot in the workplace. I was able to see how working professionals develop software in a systematic and agile manner. I would say my Chinese proficiency has improved by a lot, although I don't think I would be able to sustain a proper conversation in the workplace lmao. More importantly, I experienced living overseas by myself for the first time. It was certainly a refreshing and amazing experience living and working in Taiwan, and I would definitely visit here again in the future.