Compass Fellowship 2026

Honestly, the whole camp can only be described as “magical.” No other word really fits what I experienced.

Before Applying

The second half of 2025 wasn’t great for me. I was struggling between graduate coursework and free will, and more than once I considered dropping. Every day I tried to find a way of living that fit me, and to regain a sense of control over my life between a startup future and a big-company future.

NTU is an interesting environment; it makes you want to drop (X). NTU has a lot of resources that let students see more of the world. Compared with NYCU, NTU has many seniors with “magical careers.” That fills the environment with possibility, but it also leaves students with a lot of pressure and a lot of what-ifs.

Seeing more is good for learning; in an ideal world the dataset should be as large as possible, but we are still human - we have limitations. Maybe economic, mental, intellectual, or background factors made it hard for me to believe these things could naturally happen to me. Once the voice “maybe I’m not special” appears, that environment instantly becomes suffocating.

Application and Interview

Below is the introduction from the Compass Fellowship website:

Compass Fellowship is dedicated to cultivating three core capacities: “understanding the world,” “self-awareness,” and “realizing one’s vision.” We believe these capacities are essential to education, yet often overlooked. In today’s rapidly changing world, whether for personal growth or global issues, they are indispensable. Through an intensive five-day program, we create an interdisciplinary and inspiring learning environment so curious, impact-driven youth can explore and think with peers and instructors, and build these core capacities through practice. By the end of camp, Compass Fellows expand the possibilities in their lives and build long-term relationships that support continued exploration, deep questioning, and pursuing their vision. With world-class instructors from Harvard, MIT, Google, X/Twitter, and more, participants learn to understand the world precisely, clarify their values and beliefs, and find more effective ways to act.

Honestly, after the Jianing spiritual-course incident, normal people in Taiwan should be on full guard against this kind of spiritual-course intro?? But apparently I wasn’t, so I still went. bruh. Shout out to Morgane for giving me courage?

After submitting the application, the interview came next. My interviewer was Chelsea (Researcher at Sutter Hill Ventures). Once I realized she worked in VC, a big worry lifted. The interview was straightforward: a full-English self-intro, motivations, what I’d been thinking about recently, startups, ideals. I really liked the vibe. What stuck with me most was when I asked:

“What’s it like graduating from Harvard?”

“First of all, it’s a good college, and there is no doubt that the students from here get privileges. It feels like I have more choices and flexibility. I can take more risk to do something that is hard.”

It was an answer I hadn’t expected, but also very direct and pure.

Day 1-2

We stayed on the 9floor of a co-living space near Jingmei. The moment you walk in, it’s full of carpets, pillows, bean bags, and a pile of props.

In those 48 hours, I slept about 12. Two days of high-intensity conversations. The content mostly centered on understanding myself, with occasional math estimation sprinkled in. (Fermi blabla, and then I realized the person teaching Fermi was an MIT Math PhD…)

There was a lot of time to design and schedule things yourself - extreme freedom. Participants came from very different backgrounds (Korea, various US states, Malaysia, and more). In this environment, you can speak freely and also receive stimuli you would never get in daily life. It was my first time living with people whose backgrounds were completely different from mine, and I deeply felt how homogeneous my surroundings in Taipei usually are. Reflection and deep thinking may require this kind of special environment. For that, I am deeply grateful and in full agreement.

Over these two days, we hiked, sang, visited night markets, picnicked in parks, shared around a wooden table, and played board games from different countries. We shared, we thought. These four days felt like a sitcom; I felt like I played a role in Friends. We co-built this environment through our different mental models. In a collective of wildly different people, everyone’s way of thinking adds a new color to the space. For me, it also helped me find my place - like a highly specialized team, I was one indispensable piece.

Day 3 | Quest Day

What is your Quest Day?

That is kind of a FAQ when I come back to the camp for the after party lol.

Shout out to Rachel - it was the first time I moved an idea from thought to validation so quickly.

Have you ever played a color game? When I played, I noticed more details in ordinary life. From there I wondered how to let others feel that value too. One participant worked in beauty; Rachel said it reminded her of how color feelings and aesthetics are expressed. And a few days earlier we had talked about observing one’s inner reaction, so we started a little inner-reaction adventure in the park LOL (shout out to Flora for giving us her third perspective).

We collected the emotions colors evoke, and we also used emotions to parse colors. We found that our definitions of colors were very different; the only consensus was the color wheel we learned as kids (Color Wheel). But that isn’t fully accurate. We are still far from precisely expressing how we think about color.

Maybe because of different backgrounds, our emotions about color are gradually reshaped from raw human intuition. Maybe everyone should be able to define their own color wheel. That was my Quest Day.

Opportunities and Limits

As I said, this place is full of different people - and that is its most precious asset. Zooming out, it is a union of nice-to-haves. Because there are peers from different backgrounds, staff with their own life stories, a space where you can do whatever you think of, and all kinds of props and activities, you can truly open up, think, and embrace every possibility.

After this process, I realized my thinking about my limitations could shift. In such a highly heterogeneous environment, I saw many things I could never do happen in other people’s lives, but I also saw that the things I can do easily are not easily replicated by others. These limitations give everyone their own unique side. And it is that uniqueness that helps me, in an environment full of resources and possibilities, find my own path and make choices that may diverge from social values but that I accept.

Conclusion

I learned guitar, social dance, how to play improv, small talk, and some weird cultural injections lol. I ran popping and Vibe Coding classes. I saw what value a COO should truly bring. I saw how different it can be to handle the same thing in different countries. I also saw how shared everyone’s worries are - maybe because we are all still human i guess.

Shout out to Sicong for the sharing and late-night talks. If you want to come to Taiwan, I’m always free.

Shout out to Riley for listening and for the park chats - so relaxing.

Thanks to Leo for being my roommate; chatting with a grad student from Dajin in this environment was fun.

Thanks to Nancy and Flora for coming to my popping sharing session lol.

Thanks to Rachel for being my external brain; I became a workaholic for an afternoon.

Thanks to Andrew, Ping-Yi, Morgane, and Christine for somehow making me famous in the second cohort?

Thanks to Vivian Sophia for organizing meals every day and quietly supporting the whole space.

Thanks to Bryan and Minji for playing guitar with me - I had a good time.

Thanks to everyone on the rooftop for providing emotional value.

Thanks to David for making the whole thing come true.