Wide-ranging activist vision
After graduating from high school, Shen went on to enter an interdisciplinary humanities and social sciences program at National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) and then the Graduate School of Journalism at National Taiwan University. Now she’s getting her doctorate at NTU’s College of Management. Her explorations in these three different fields of study have brought different perspectives to her public interest work.
Since she was 11, Shen has applied computer technology to every movement she’s been a part of. Consequently, many felt that Shen would pursue her college education in a field related to information technology. But she had other plans: “Taiwan doesn’t lack computer engineers; it lacks people schooled in the social sciences and humanities.”
When she entered graduate school, Shen’s choice once again caused a bit of an uproar. She had long been reporting on and photographing social movements, so in many ways she was already a reporter, and the nature of journalism, as a field in which one learns by doing, deeply attracted her. In deciding to enroll in NTU’s journalism school, she also wanted to show where her original interests had lain all along.
After the public interest work that Shen did was included in national high-school textbooks, doubts about her efforts surfaced: “Does this kind of approach really work?” To demonstrate that she had multidisciplinary skills, she applied to a bunch of programs in addition to journalism at NTU, and was admitted to nine altogether, including management at NTU, sociology at NTHU, and management of technology at National Chiao Tung University.
In September of last year, Shen entered the doctoral program in management at NTU, which has allowed her to look at public interest concerns from the angle of business. Shen explains that business management and public interest work have many points in common. Recently, the notion of “social entrepreneurship” has been introduced as a means of combining business with public interest work.
Apart from continuing to work on educational and rural issues, this year Shen hopes to extend the definition of “public interest” by turning her focus to traditional industries, both the familiar and the unfamiliar.
When Shen was young, her father had a failing clothing business, which then started to turn the corner after Shen helped set up a website for it. In Shen’s eyes, establishing a web presence is just a basic part of marketing. The truly difficult challenge is industrial upgrading: “Through that transition, one can make progress in closing the urban–rural educational gap.” That’s the next step in Shen’s grand plan.
Shen taught herself computer skills in order to set up the An An Free Education Website, which provides disadvantaged children with self-study materials.