From Practice to Theory: Why I Chose Service Science

For a long time, my approach to solving problems was purely execution-oriented. Coming from an under-resourced background, I taught myself programming and business principles by doing. Whether it was running a Shopee store in high school or co-founding EdTech startups (Huixing and Read AI) in college, my philosophy was simple: build it, launch it, and iterate.

While this hands-on approach yielded initial successes—such as securing NT$1.5M in funding and reaching 10,000+ students—it also revealed a critical weakness.

The Bottleneck of Intuition

As our platforms grew, passion and practical engineering skills were no longer enough. We began hitting bottlenecks:

• Business Model Validation: How do we systematically prove our model works beyond initial traction?
• Scalability: How do we design architectures that handle exponential growth without breaking?
• User Research: We validated our "Meow Night Cafe" MVP using 500 survey responses, but our analysis was largely intuitive, lacking rigorous qualitative and quantitative methodologies.

I realized that my "practice" lacked a systematic, scientific foundation.

Enter Service Science

This realization is what drew me to the Institute of Service Science (ISS) at NTHU. Service Science treats value creation as an ecosystem—a combination of people, technology, business, and data.

Through modules in Information Systems and Service Innovation & Design, I am learning to elevate my practical skills to a theoretical level:

• Moving from just writing functional APIs to understanding Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) for designing highly cohesive, loosely coupled distributed systems.
• Transforming intuitive user surveys into rigorous User Research Methods and Behavior Change Design, scientifically uncovering the deep-seated motivations behind user behavior.

The Cross-Disciplinary Integrator

My ultimate goal is to bridge the gap between technology, business, and user needs. The ISS curriculum is the perfect blueprint for my transformation from a hands-on practitioner into a builder equipped with scientific thinking.

By merging my past lean operational experiences—from Lootex data pipelines to NPO serverless architectures—with cutting-edge scientific theory, I aim to design more impactful and sustainable service systems in the future.