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Introduction

HUTLC was founded in 2007 by the Harvard Club of ROC. Bringing together high school students from all over Taiwan, creating a memorable week where you can have fun and learn from Harvard students and professionals from various fields.

Application

I found out about HUTLC five days before their application deadline in May. Two essays, one self-introduction video, and daily manifestations until the acceptance letter in June.

This year HUTLC received exactly 500 applications from students all over Taiwan and expected to accept around 100 students.

Experience

Homeroom

I think homeroom time was part of what made our bond so strong, it was quality time within the team, getting to share our day, play games, karaoke, and practice for our talent show performance.

Lectures

Lectures were held by Harvard Students, teaching a variety of topics ranging from goal setting, public speaking, slow living, neurobiology, investment, and facing failure.

Guest Speaker Talks

HUTLC invites professionals from different fields to teach us about their careers, this year we had four guest speakers from backgrounds of global connections, independent media, business, academia, and music.

Career Fair

We had the opportunity to learn from professionals about their jobs, including academia, architecture, medicine, law, and business. I got to hear from architecture, law, and business.

Architecture is already complicated as it is, but I didn’t know architects also had to consider the directions of wind, and the area of natural lighting the building could get.

Stereotypically, lawyers are the people who sit in courts, fighting for justice. But according to our guest speaker, that’s not true. Most of a lawyer’s time is spent in the office looking at papers. Being a lawyer might be very different from what you think it is!

Business people shake hands often, and you can tell what a person is like from their handshake. Are they smiling and confident? Is the grasp firm enough? Or is it awkward? a good handshake can change others’ perspectives of you, so maybe practice it at home.

Mock Interview

Anxious in waiting rooms, we’re waiting for our turn to go into our mock interviews. Each student is paired with one Harvard teacher, who’s going to take you through a typical college interview procedure. The interview wasn’t based on any application, so after your self-introduction, the teachers asked you questions based on what you said.

From the feedback, I learned that my answers could be fun and casual, but you have to know what you’re talking about, in-depth. What I found difficult was keeping eye contact while answering, as there was only one interviewer, and keeping my eyes on them made the background seem to be spinning.

Student Project

At the beginning of the conference, a teacher announced topics for the student project, which is a project we have to work on by ourselves within the team. There were three topics to choose from: AI’s use in Taiwan, Humanities and Science majors, and Climate Change. Our team chose AI. For the presentation, I was in charge of the opening, a basic introduction to artificial intelligence, and TSMC’s contribution to Taiwan’s place in AI.

Talent Show

I highly encourage attendees to participate in the Talent Show, it doesn’t have to be the most impressive performance but the crowd would think it is. Everyone was so

Prom

It was exciting getting to experience this American high school tradition, the most exciting part I would say is seeing all the promposals. 96 students attended this year’s conference, and around 25 of them were boys. So although a couple of guys asked the girls to be their prom date, the rest of them were lucky to have girls asking them, but hey it’s 2023, so this fits the aesthetic right?

If you ever have the chance to attend, move fast, the guys are gone fast.

click here to see what our prom looked like from the outside ;))

What made it different?

Taiwan is promoting bilingual education, and in a lot of college applications you would see that they’re looking for students who have cultural awareness, but the definition is kind of vague of what makes you culturally aware or sensitive.

I’ve attended a few camps hosted by normal universities in Taiwan, and they were all great, you could really tell the college students put in work and effort for the camp, but why is it that 2023 HUTLC applicants all have HUTLC’23 in their social media bios and are posting pictures from the conference even after a month of it ending? This is something I thought about for a long time, is it the American education system? or the general personality of the attendees Harvard students picked? or is it the format of our dorm? or the interaction we had with our teachers which brought us together? There were so many aspects I thought about

The teachers wanted us to meet as many as people possible, so every team we were in consisted of people from different teams, the same applied to our dorm rooms