Taiwan NextGen Foundation’s Post

Thank you Madam President for your endorsement and encouragement! It is an honor to stand beside fellow doers!

I am delighted to share that I have finished my summer internship as Research Assistant at Taiwan NextGen Foundation, a Taipei-based think tank dedicated to making Taiwan more sustainable, diverse, and inclusive. It was a once-in-a-life internship experience enabling me to develop my career interest in public policy and sharpen my research, event-planning, and critical thinking skills. As Research Assistant, I extensively researched Taiwan’s local politics, focusing on Chiayi County’s agricultural policies. As one of Taiwan’s largest agricultural cities, Chiayi County possesses a long-established horticultural industry and rich agricultural resources that can date back to the Japanese colonial period, having served as Taiwan’s critical granary for decades. Nevertheless, the county’s agricultural industry has faced tremendous challenges in recent years, including labor shortages, precarious market conditions, and water scarcity, primarily due to Taiwan’s swift industrial transformation and global warming. My key role as Research Assistant was to investigate the county and central governments’ current policies addressing these issues and to provide future policy suggestions, specifically for legislators. I worked closely with other research assistants to conduct fieldwork, interviewing local farmers and lawmakers and visiting multiple agricultural sites to understand better the policy’s effectiveness and impact on different stakeholders. In addition to policy research, I facilitated the congressional campaign trail of the CEO, who would represent Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party to run for legislator in Chiayi County’s Second District at the end of this year. I assisted with the event-planning process and used my comprehensive research on Chiayi County to assist with the CEO’s policy presentation. I also facilitated the post-event wrap-ups, drafting the press releases and social media posts. I want to extend my special thanks to the CEO Kuan-Ting Chen, for his trailblazing leadership and timely feedback that helped me complete this internship. I also want to thank my colleagues 江佳紘, 郭佳臻, 陳柏叡, 林邵允, and 冠穎, who worked with me scrupulously and encouraged me to step out of my comfort zone working on this project. #TeamTaiwan #Internship