My Journey into Law, Part II: Life at the Institute and Planning My Thesis

A Very Different Culture and Atmosphere

I entered with what I knew from graduate school in the sciences: the ultimate goal was to write a solid thesis and graduate, professors were in high demand, and you had to secure a place with an advisor as early as possible. So as soon as I learned that I had made it into the program from the waitlist, I immediately emailed the professor I hoped would advise me, Professor Chia-Ho Lin at NCCU. I told him that I hoped to work under his supervision and outlined the topic and structure I had in mind for my thesis.

When I met him over a meal to discuss supervision, I gingerly asked why I had felt so thoroughly grilled during the interview, only to be admitted afterward without really understanding why. He said, “It was a test. It meant the interviewers appreciated you and were interested in you. If they had no interest in you at all, they probably would not have bothered asking many questions. They asked sharp questions because they wanted to see how you would respond.” As for formally becoming my advisor, he said, “If you still feel the same way in the second semester of your first year, come back and ask me then.”

Huh? Why the second semester? What about the first semester? Without an advisor, who was I supposed to meet with every week? How would I report my thesis progress? Wasn’t there a literature review I needed to do first?

My head was full of questions, but I answered immediately: “Okay!”

There was, naturally, an orientation that summer. But I knew no one, and my previous field was completely different, so I had no idea how to talk to people—or what I would even talk about if I tried. I ended up bringing work from the cram school and preparing lessons during orientation. I thought: I am just here to acquire the knowledge, finish the thesis, and leave. I am definitely not going to work in law afterward, so I probably do not need to make friends, right?

During the introductions, it was obvious that many people were pursuing a second graduate degree and came from all kinds of fields. That was completely different from my previous program, where most students had entered straight from university. Then there was the number of required course credits—it was terrifying =口=, more than twice what my previous program had required. Still, I figured I would take it as it came. The institute allowed us up to four years to complete our coursework, so surely I would have enough time, right?

As it turned out, I was far too naive XD

Another shock: there was no graduate-student office. In my environmental-health program, seats were assigned over the summer, so everyone had a small space of their own for classes and thesis work. At the law institute, permanent desks seemed to require an application and were restricted by year. In the end, I went to NCCU only for class. Between classes, I had to hunt for an empty classroom where I could eat and rest; if I wanted to study or look for thesis materials, I had to compete for a seat in the library at the General Building Orz. Law also required a staggering number of books, and carrying them around was exhausting. I gradually developed the habit of organizing anything I found into Word files, keeping everything digital whenever possible instead of printing it or carrying it with me.

Because I had not yet secured an advisor and had learned virtually no law, my thesis stalled. With the institute not yet in session, I happily spent the entire summer doing nothing and waited for classes to begin. As for choosing courses... there could not be that much to choose from, right? I would just click on whatever the institute offered and that should be enough, right? I had no idea what any of those Something-or-Other Laws actually covered, so I simply enrolled in all of them for the time being!

The Odd One Out in Class and on Exams

Classes

There was not much choice in the first semester: Civil Law, Criminal Law, and Administrative Law. I had no foundation at all, so courses such as Labor Law were obviously out of the question. I would have understood nothing.

I remember going to my first class thinking, “It is the first session; surely they will just take attendance,” or, “Even if the professor teaches, it cannot be very much.” I brought only a few sheets of loose-leaf paper and some stationery. Then I looked around and saw a pocket statute book on everyone’s desk, the textbook for that particular subject, and, in many cases, a voice recorder.

“They bought the textbook before class even started? Are we going to have exercises and assignments?” In my previous courses, there might be a designated textbook, but the professor always used slides, so studying the slides was enough for midterms and finals. I bought a textbook only when every class came with an assignment and the questions were taken from specific exercises in the book. Later, I did start buying textbooks for foundational sciences such as general physics, chemistry, and biology whether or not there was homework—although I rarely finished them XD.

What I did not expect was that every subject would launch into a full lecture from the very first class, sometimes running past the scheduled end time—and I am not exaggerating. In Civil Law, we used the pocket statute book far more than I could have imagined, flipping through it almost every five minutes. Because I had not brought one, I had to look up statutes on my phone. I was also astonished that the professors could recite article numbers and their contents from memory. My classmates moved through their statute books effortlessly; every copy was covered in notes and tabs. Beside them, I looked like a complete Muggle, constantly searching on my phone.

Criminal Law was different. The General Part was basically one homicide after another; by the end of the course, the bodies of all those hypothetical “A”s could have formed a hill. Unsurprisingly, we opened the statute book far less often.

No matter the subject, every professor spoke extremely quickly. Even though I already wrote very fast by hand, I clearly could not keep up. In my previous classes, the professor would explain a section, then pause to let students think and take notes. Law school did not wait for anyone: the words just kept coming and coming and coming. My Criminal Law professor did use slides and a self-prepared handout that we could download later. But I soon discovered that most professors used no slides at all—only the board =口=. I could not absorb the material while looking at the board and listening at the same time, so I spent about a week completely floundering. The Civil Law and Criminal Law professors explained things so clearly that, if I took no notes, I could follow both the content and the reasoning perfectly in class. But then my notebook would be blank, I would have nothing when I got home, and reviewing would be impossible.

You may be wondering: what exactly do you take notes on in a law class?

Not the definitions; those are already in the textbooks. What matters is the chain of reasoning behind a problem and the professors’ views on particular issues. Textbooks do not always include those things. They often appear in professors’ articles, but even there, space limits may leave much of the reasoning unexplained. Sometimes we were even getting a preview of an article the professor was still writing and had not yet published. That was pure gold!

I realized this could not continue, so I borrowed a friend’s recordings from the first week and listened again to fill in my notes. After that, I decided that in every class I would write entirely by listening, without looking at the board. I also pushed my handwriting speed even further so that I could write down every sentence, argument, and line of reasoning while thinking along with the professor.

That let me keep up, but after two classes my hand was usually wrecked. If I had several classes in one day, my right hand simply could not cope Orz. Eventually I switched to typing notes on a laptop, which also let me look up statutes as I worked, and everything became much easier. Occasionally, though, I encountered a professor who prohibited laptops in class. Then it was back to frantic handwriting.

Preparing for Midterms and Finals

Law exams were another source of confusion. I had never written essay questions or case-analysis problems; my exams had always used multiple-choice questions, fill-in-the-blank questions, or calculations. I did not even understand the difference between an essay question and a case problem, and I still mix them up sometimes. To me, they were all just... questions that required a lot of writing.

The moment I realized I might fail in my very first year came one week before the Civil Law midterm, when a classmate asked the professor: “Are we supposed to use the legal syllogism on the Civil Law exam?”

Legal syllogism? What was that? There was a prescribed structure for writing an exam answer =口=?

I had no idea where to find out what a “legal syllogism” was. I had not bought the Civil Law textbook and had relied entirely on the lectures. Even if I bought it then, the exam was barely more than a week away; I probably could not finish it in time.

“Whatever, I will just write something. If I fail, I will withdraw from the program. It is no big deal!” Fortunately, the Civil Law professor and teaching assistant took pity on me, so my grade that semester was not too disastrous. Most of my grades were just over 70. Looking back, I suspect the professors and teaching assistants simply could not bring themselves to fail me... after all, 70 is the passing grade for NCCU master’s students. During winter break, I finally sat down seriously with Professor Wang Tse-chien’s General Principles of Civil Law and at last understood what a legal syllogism was.

Criminal Law was different. From the beginning, the professor clearly taught us the TB–R–S framework, and the midterm was a take-home exam, so that was less of a problem. The professor was also extremely funny and an excellent teacher, making Criminal Law my favorite and strongest subject at the time, without question. The following semester brought a different professor whose teaching style I could not absorb at all, and Criminal Law promptly collapsed for me too—but that is another story...

It was only much later that I learned that preparing for law exams required more than attending lectures. You also had to buy and study other books—often several books by different authors for a single subject. Most of my classmates were enrolled in comprehensive law-exam cram courses and studied the cram schools’ materials; everyone else read textbooks. I relied only on my lecture notes, which meant I effectively walked naked into every midterm and final of my first year. The worst part was that I did not realize this until the final grades came out Orz.

Law school also had another mysterious institution: the “teaching-assistant session.” At the start of each course, students could choose a time for these sessions. Being completely new, I assumed they were simply office hours—you went only if you had a question—so I never attended. Much later, I discovered that the teaching assistants actually taught students how to structure answers and even suggested what might appear on the professor’s midterm and final. I had completely missed an incredible resource and learning opportunity =口=.

Eventually I got it: without cram school, preparing for a law exam meant reading the entire textbook before each midterm or final. Every field of law had its own framework and mode of reasoning, and that framework was the method for answering questions. Later, when I prepared for the national examinations, I learned that textbooks alone were nowhere near enough—but that, too, is another story...

Research Papers

The papers were the worst of all. In Administrative Law at the institute, I was asked to write a major paper despite having no foundation in the subject. I had never even heard of the Administrative Penalty Act when the professor mentioned the “Guanyin Industrial Park wastewater” issue in class. I thought: this sounds like an environmental-law problem, right? I know at least a little about water pollution, so I will choose that! It turned out to be nothing like what I had imagined =口=. I had to patiently learn enough of the administrative-penalty portion of Administrative Law to get by, then search the library for papers and cobble together something I could submit. I muddled my way through the entire course. Predictably, my Administrative Law was also absolute garbage.

After writing all of that, the short version is that I had no idea what I was doing throughout my entire first year. In the second semester, I even took a quality-management course at the business school and completed piles of statistics assignments just to recover a tiny bit of confidence—enough to keep crawling along at rock bottom instead of deciding I was complete garbage, filling out the withdrawal form at lightning speed, and leaving immediately XDDD.

Wanting Something Different from Everyone Else

“Are you going to take the Bar Examination and the Examination for Judges and Prosecutors?” a classmate asked me near the beginning of the semester.

“Huh? What exams?” I asked, confused.

“To become a lawyer, judge, or prosecutor!” Their tone made it sound as though I had asked an incredibly stupid question.

That was the first time I had ever heard the terms “lawyer” and “judge or prosecutor.”

Why was I studying at the Graduate Institute of Law and Interdisciplinary Studies? At the time, my answer was simple: I had a responsibility to complete a project I had once failed to finish properly. But there was probably something deeper too. I wanted more people to know that graduates of public health can do all kinds of things—that it is an excellent field. When our department spoke about interdisciplinarity, it meant genuinely going deep into another discipline, not learning a shallow little bit of everything. I wanted to bring everything I had learned in public health into law, start from zero, earn recognition from people in the legal field, and use my master’s thesis to create a genuine interdisciplinary synthesis.

But most of the people I met at the institute did not seem to see it that way. Many students—at least among those I encountered—appeared to enroll in order to meet the coursework requirements for the Bar Examination and the Examination for Judges and Prosecutors. Writing a thesis was not necessarily their primary purpose.

Most of them also took distance-learning cram-school courses. At the time, I assumed cram school meant attending classes in person, but apparently not; recorded and online courses were also an option. I had no idea online learning was already so widespread before the pandemic XD. I had really been living under a rock.

But I was a first-year student who did not even understand the legal syllogism. How could I talk seriously about becoming a lawyer, judge, or prosecutor? I could only answer awkwardly: “No, I am not taking those exams. I am in graduate school only to write my thesis.”

As expected, I received a look that said, “Are you some kind of weirdo?” To avoid being caught off guard by that question again, I researched the Bar Examination and the Examination for Judges and Prosecutors, including their elective subjects.

“Are you going to take the exams?”

“Probably!”

“Which elective group will you choose?”

“Labor and social laws!” Heh. I had done my homework this time!

“Oh. Then we will not be competing against each other.” Huh?

Rethinking How I Learned

After being battered for an entire first year, I finally realized that my old study methods simply did not work in law. I had to change them. Otherwise, the blows might make me withdraw before I ever wrote the thesis—never mind achieving anything interdisciplinary or actually completing the degree.

I also discovered, while reading case problems, that most cases do not involve only one field of law or remain neatly within one part or chapter of a code. A traffic accident will not ask only about a limitation period; it will also raise tort issues and may connect to civil procedure, the criminal offense of negligent injury, or an ancillary civil action under criminal procedure. Most problem-solving books on the market explain questions from the national examinations. If I jumped straight into those books without first studying all the relevant subjects, my answers would always be missing pieces. The overlap between Constitutional Law and Administrative Law made this especially obvious in public law. Unless I worked steadily through the entire foundation once, my understanding could never be complete. So I set myself the following rules:

Do Not Answer Problems or Discuss Cases Until I Have Read All the Textbooks

Of course, reading every subject was impossible; law is far too broad. But surely there had to be some “minimum foundation” of knowledge. If so, what benchmark could define which subjects belonged in that foundation?

I reasoned that if many people in the legal profession passed through the Bar Examination or the Examination for Judges and Prosecutors, their exam subjects could serve as “the minimum legal knowledge the public expects of a legal professional.” I therefore used those subjects as my basic textbook reading list. I also researched the fields I might encounter in the future and added them to the list, then mapped the foundational subjects on which each field depended. That became the skill tree I used to organize my learning and reading.

For course selection, I tried to follow the sequence of the skill tree and my reading progress while completing the minimum graduation credits within the four-year master’s program. If the available courses did not follow the order of my skill tree, I would reluctantly follow the exam schedule instead and do enough to meet the course requirements.

The textbooks were so thick that by the time I reached the end, I might have forgotten the beginning. The same content would also appear once in class and again when I read the book. Without a good note system to bring everything together, the information would remain scattered and impossible to find. I therefore began creating a digital set of notes for each subject, recording my own process of understanding what I read so that I could later retrieve the material for my thesis.

For example, when civil procedure referred to a concept from Civil Law, I would return to my earlier notes and review it at the same time. Over time, the boundaries between fields became less rigid when I read cases or case-analysis problems. I could move more smoothly between Civil Law and Criminal Law, or between substantive and procedural law. I suppose that counted as a small improvement!

Building the Foundation While Searching for a Thesis Breakthrough

The central question in my thesis was how to interpret the relationship between the Occupational Safety and Health Act and the scope of employer liability. I did not know where to find a solution, so I searched for ideas while reading textbooks and tried to read absolutely everything I could in the hope of finding a breakthrough. It probably looked ridiculous and mindless XD, but when I had nothing else, it was the greatest effort I knew how to make.

Every field I finished produced another digital notes file. It was disappointing each time a book failed to contain the answer to my thesis, but that was fine—I believed the next one would.

As I read more and more, ideas I had once been unable to understand gradually connected and began to make sense. At last, in a collection of scholarship on individual labor law, I found the crucial solution and argument for my thesis. I could finally glimpse the faintest light of graduation Q口Q.

Gradually Improving My Legal Writing and Gathering Different Views

I had always known how I answered case-analysis and essay questions. The flattering description was “free-form”; the honest one was “an unstructured mess that caused the reader immense pain.” Reading more books had helped me find a rough structure, but I still needed a more efficient way to revise and improve it.

The most efficient solution was to look for a commercially published book on legal writing for lawyers. I found one titled About Lawyers’ Documents: An Introduction to Legal Writing for New Lawyers. I also considered enrolling in a problem-solving course at a cram school. My reasoning was this: if professors and practitioners graded the national examinations, then the methods taught for answering those exams should also offer one model of legal writing. I was not attending cram school for the sake of the national examinations, but surely I would still gain something from it!

The biggest problem with textbooks is that they often present only one view, or at most a small number of competing views, and their content can be dated. Newer arguments still depend on scholarly articles, which are essential if you want to develop multiple perspectives for analyzing a problem. But gathering everything myself would have taken far too much time to be worthwhile, so I outsourced that work to the cram school. Crucially, I enrolled only after I had read textbooks for all the foundational subjects and built a dedicated digital notes file for each one. That meant I could immediately integrate the materials I collected into my existing notes, upgrading my knowledge from its initial version to a more current one in the least possible time XDDDD.

Managing My Time

Balancing Study and Everything Outside Class

My job was a little unusual: I taught senior-high physics at a cram school. I was fairly lazy and taught only three classes, one for each year of senior high. A properly hardworking cram-school teacher would pack the schedule with multiple groups at every level XD; teaching only three was unquestionably slacking off. Because I had always worked while pursuing degrees, I concentrated my teaching on weekends. That left weekdays for the degree, studying, and thesis work—the routine I had followed since I began teaching in my third year of university. As for rest... I slept every day, so that counted as rest. I did not need leisure or entertainment XDDD.

Even while buried in law, I continued learning many other things. I did not want to abandon my background in environmental and occupational health, so I kept working toward certification as dedicated indoor-air-quality personnel. To make my thesis discussion of ISO 45001 more persuasive, I also found time to qualify as an ISO 45001 Lead Auditor. Unfortunately, because I worked every weekend, I never managed to collect the full set of environmental certifications covering air pollution, water pollution, waste, and toxic substances. I had rather neglected my original profession.

Unexpectedly, I also completed nearly 1,500 practice questions to earn a statistics certification and keep my data-analysis skills from going rusty. Whether I would ever have a chance to return to data analysis as a career was another question...

I believed that “a teacher who does nothing but teach will only become worse at teaching.” So while pursuing the degree, I kept up with curriculum changes, revised my course materials, and read large amounts of popular science to maintain my standard as a physics teacher instead of deteriorating badly just because I had entered law school. In the end, the subjects that deteriorated most were my English and mathematics...

Through a friend, I happened to encounter digital marketing. That opened a long series of new projects: building websites, studying marketing, learning to produce different kinds of media, editing videos, and more. I squeezed them into periods when I had no classes, moments when I secretly worked on my own things during class X), and the hours after work at the cram school. After learning all of that, I could finally produce all the assets I needed and comfortably build a personal website with decent functionality and reasonably good colors.

My schedule consistently allocated 40% to law and 60% to other work or learning. I was busy, but life felt full, and I genuinely liked living that way.

My Thesis Timeline

After the adjustment period of my first year, I finally brought my mindset and methods into line with the demands of law school. In the second semester, I still wanted the same thesis topic and the same advisor—I had come to NCCU for him, after all, aaaaaah!—so I happily formalized the supervision arrangement.

I spent my second and third years searching for thesis content and sources. In the second semester of my third year, I finally found the crucial reference, began writing the thesis piece by piece, and graduated right at the end of my fourth year.

Unlike my experience in a science graduate program, I hardly ever discussed the substance of my thesis with my advisor while I was at the institute. The only time we specifically reviewed and revised anything was when I submitted my thesis proposal and he suggested some additional topics I could cover. The next time I went to him was after the full thesis was complete. This was an obvious difference from graduate study in the sciences: there was no weekly meeting, no progress report, and no need to know what the other students under the same advisor were researching. Progress depended entirely on my own self-discipline.

That does not mean the professors did not care about their students! They cared a great deal. You could at least find them on Facebook XD, and they replied to messages incredibly quickly. At the time, though, I felt that this was my second thesis and that I should not still depend on an advisor’s pressure to make me write. Until the thesis was complete, I thought I should solve as many problems as possible myself. Anything less would have felt unworthy of the training I received in my previous graduate program.

After going through all of this, however, I still think you should discuss a thesis’s structure and argumentative direction with your advisor from time to time. If you wait until the entire thing is written to discover a fatal problem, it is far too late Orz.

Conclusion

Almost everything I did at the institute revolved around the thesis I had brought with me at the beginning. It took an entire year to develop a mindset truly suited to learning law. Looking back, that experience confirmed something my advisor once said at a faculty-student dinner:

“You cannot learn law well until you let go of a science student’s arrogance.”

During my first year, I copied the learning experience and attitude that had worked for me before. In truth, I was relying on the arrogance produced by my previous academic background, and that was why I crashed so spectacularly. Once I sincerely let go of that arrogance, returned to the very bottom, and began reading one page at a time, I slowly worked my way upward. I am still not particularly good, but at least I am a little better than before, and my legal arguments are now barely readable.

Learning an entirely new field is intensely painful. But after being knocked all the way down and climbing back up, I gained another perspective from which to interpret the world. The view is completely different, and that is genuinely joyful. The struggle really was worth it.