Political Science Is More Than Politics: Four Years at NTU

Before I started at NTU, I tracked down the Political Science department's course map and scanned it from top to bottom. Constitutional law, comparative government, public policy. I figured I had a reasonable picture of what the next four years held. I'd taken civics in high school. Politics is politics. The university version couldn't be that different.

Four years later, I understood how wrong that assumption was.

Year one: political science really is just political science

The first few semesters were more or less as expected. Constitutional law examined the logic of institutional design. Political theory looked at how different thinkers define liberty, equality, and justice, then pull each other's definitions apart. Not that those courses were dull, but they felt like "knowledge about politics" rather than tools for figuring out how to get things done.

I was running EdYouth at the same time, making real judgment calls every week: how do you frame a demand so policymakers will take it seriously? Is this the right moment to move, or is it too early? The frameworks from the classroom didn't seem able to answer those questions yet. Theory was on one side, reality on the other, a gap between them.

Looking back, that gap was normal. It's roughly what separates academic knowledge from practical judgment.

Sociology: seeing both the tree and the forest

Then came a semester when I took Sociology, a mandatory course offered by NTU's Department of Sociology.

I chose it partly because friends were taking it, partly because I'd attended a humanities and social sciences summer program in high school and already knew the discipline mattered. I had some sense of sociology going in, and this course expanded the outline and gave me more to see and think about.

Sociology gave me something I'd call "seeing structure." Not abstract governmental architecture, but the kind of structure you're so deep inside you can't see at all: whose range of choices gets structurally narrowed by default, why collective action is so hard to produce, how inequality is reproduced across generations through institutional arrangements.

Taking that perspective back into EdYouth changed how I thought about the people I was trying to reach. The same issue shifted from "who is opposing me" to "who is in what position, facing what information and resource constraints." The frame changed, the questions changed, and the arguments that made sense changed with them.

After that, I stopped thinking of the gap as "the distance between academic and practical." The gap was something you could cross repeatedly: classroom gives a perspective, reality gives a problem, the problem sharpens the perspective (or breaks it), and you come back to the classroom with better questions.

Quantitative tools: a detour that started with failing a course

On the quantitative side of political science: Social Statistics, Public Opinion Survey, and Program Evaluation. I'll admit I didn't finish all three until senior year.

Sophomore year I took Social Statistics once and failed it. I didn't really know what any of it was for. Running regressions, reading significance values. It was just moving numbers around with nothing real pulling me toward the question. Naturally, it didn't stick.

The real turning point was junior year. That semester I took nearly 15 credits of Python-related courses, and the most important was Python Data Analysis and Machine Learning. I learned for the first time how broadly machine learning, and eventually LLMs, could be applied. From that point, "data" stopped being a classroom exercise and became a tool for answering real questions. For the first time, I could see the value of quantitative skills.

"Being able to ask questions with code" and "only being able to ask questions with language" are different dimensions entirely. Language questions can be too abstract; data questions can be too concrete. But when you can work with both at once, the range of questions you can ask is different.

So when I went back senior year to finish Social Statistics, Public Opinion Survey, and Program Evaluation, I absorbed the material completely differently. How to design a sample that's actually representative, how question wording shapes answers, what causal inference means, why correlation doesn't equal causation.

But actually getting fluent with quantitative tools happened after I joined McKinsey in senior year. That was the first time I worked with data at a scale that required SQL, handling hundreds of thousands of rows, and the first time I understood what those classroom concepts actually look like in practice, and how to stack them layer by layer to answer a question with commercial consequences. The full pipeline of cleaning data, running analysis, and translating findings into a story a decision-maker can act on is something you genuinely cannot learn in a classroom alone.

Carrying that experience back to EdYouth, a lot of things came back into focus. The causal inference methods from Program Evaluation turned into a question I could no longer avoid: the policy changes EdYouth advocated for, the issues that actually made legislative progress: did we cause those, or were we just present at the right moment, riding changes that would have happened anyway? There's no clean answer. But being able to ask the question is more honest than continuing to assume that correlation is causation.

Cross-disciplinary coursework: deliberately taking the long way

Beyond the political science requirements, I deliberately kept my course list eclectic. Not because I was trying to be "interdisciplinary." I was genuinely curious about a lot of things, and I wanted to use coursework to find what I actually cared about most.

Freshman year I took Spanish, Cultural Innovation and Brand Practice, EU Studies, and History and Modern Society simultaneously. The most immediate lesson from those courses was: "so this is how a different field frames the same problem."

Sophomore year I took Consecutive Interpretation, Shakespeare's Sonnets, and an entrepreneurship practicum taught by a lecturer from another university. One pushed me to work through rhythm word by word; the other had me build a business model from scratch. Seemingly unrelated, but both were training the same thing: how to make something stand with the fewest words and fewest conditions possible.

Junior year I tilted more deliberately toward business and policy. Government and Business was the first time I thought systematically in the language of "markets" rather than "institutions." Political science asks who has decision-making authority and how institutions constrain action; business courses ask who has incentives, who bears costs, what the incentive structure looks like. Different frameworks on the surface, but they're asking the same thing underneath, just with different names for the stakeholders.

Taken together, what those courses gave me wasn't a specific body of knowledge. It was a kind of skin-swapping ability: take the same question, put it in a different shell, and ask it in a different environment.

Year four: back in the classroom

Senior year I spent more time in the classroom than any other year. EdYouth's phase was wrapping up, the internship was stable, and extracurricular density suddenly dropped. I finally had space to arrange my schedule properly, to actually sit through the political science requirements I'd previously only skimmed, including courses like Non-profit Organization Management and Western Political Philosophy.

Non-profit Organization Management was especially meaningful. It was essentially a chance to look back at EdYouth's operations, resources, and people structure through a more systematic lens. If I'd taken this course three years earlier, I'd probably have treated it as abstract theory. But coming in with three years of actually running an organization, every concept mapped to something I'd personally stumbled through.

Strangely, that turned out to be the most interesting year of my undergraduate experience. Not because I happened across exceptional courses, but because three years of accumulated practice, along with all the coursework I'd done, came back to talk to each other in senior year. The same professor teaching the same concept sounds different in year one versus year four. The same classroom idea, read with three years of real problems behind you, resonates in entirely different places.

That year I finally felt it clearly: university isn't a place to finish learning a set of things and then enter the world. It's a place to start a cycle.

Four years built a toolbox

Looking back at these four years, I think I was running the same cycle the entire time.

The classroom gives a framework. Organizational work and advocacy give a real problem. The problem sharpens the framework, or breaks it. Then you return to the classroom with better questions. From political science's institutional logic, to sociology's structural lens, to statistical tools and code, to the skin-swapping ability that came from cross-disciplinary coursework. Each step outward didn't replace what came before. It made the whole toolkit more complete and more adaptable.

When I entered NTU, I thought four years of training would make me a "political science expert." What actually happened was that I discovered the thing I liked most wasn't political science per se. It was the social science and cross-disciplinary training that gave me an ever-more-useful set of methods for breaking down and solving problems, and made me comfortable with that approach.

And I'm confident this cycle won't stop at graduation.