Do You Need to Study Abroad? Celia on Landing a UK Marketing Job

Updated 2026/10/16

This post is an edited transcript of my podcast episode (in Chinese). 👉🏻 Listen to the full episode.

If you enjoy it, please leave the podcast a five-star rating on your favorite platform 🌟 (transcripts take a lot of work 🥹)!

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Hi, and welcome to Jason’s Career Folder. I’m your host, Jason, and I share content about careers and studying abroad. Here you can open the folder and explore other people’s stories, and you can also help edit it with me: build your experience, pick up insights and learn something new.

🎤 Guest: Celia Chou

Study-abroad consulting website | https://celiachou.com/

YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/@CeliaChou

Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/celia_chou_

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In this episode:

📂 How to step out of your comfort zone abroad and connect with people from other cultures

📂 Tips for small talk

📂 Social media shows only part of the world. Experience British society for yourself and you may see it differently

📂 A global outlook: how studying abroad broke my narrow way of thinking

📂 Being culturally sensitive

📂 The job search timeline during a UK master’s

📂 Marketing depends heavily on local culture and language. How Celia found a job in the UK

📂 What people who land jobs abroad have in common

📂 Do you actually need to study abroad?

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J: Today I want to talk with Celia about studying in the UK, job hunting abroad, being a content creator, and what she has learned starting her own business as an independent study-abroad consultant. If you’re curious, keep listening! First, let’s have Celia introduce herself.

C: Hello, and thanks to Jason for inviting me onto the podcast. I’m Celia. I graduated from National Taiwan University (NTU) in Business Administration, then did a master’s in marketing at Manchester in the UK, and after that I stayed and worked at an e-commerce company there. After a while I moved back to Taiwan for family reasons, where I did marketing at a consulting firm and then joined a bank as an MA (management associate). Now I’m back in the UK, working as a study-abroad consultant who helps Taiwanese students apply for UK master’s programs.

J: I’m really glad Celia agreed to this interview. Let’s go in chronological order and start with what she did before going abroad.

Applying to and studying in the UK

Celia graduated from NTU in Business Administration and went to Manchester for marketing. Why did you decide to go abroad right after graduating?

I was pretty naive back then and didn’t think too hard about it. I just wanted to get the academic part done as soon as possible. Right after college my head was still clear and I was good at exams, so I figured studying would hurt less if I did it then.

But if I could do it again, and I were looking at it from a job-hunting angle, working in Taiwan for a few years before going back to school is the better route if you want to work abroad.

People often say UK universities have so many students from mainland China and other Chinese speakers that it hurts class discussion and the learning experience. Did you run into that?

I didn’t, actually. My class was big, but there were very few students from mainland China, fewer than five. There were quite a lot of Taiwanese, close to twenty. Then there were close to ten from the US and Canada, some British students, and around twenty or thirty from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

So it wasn’t dominated by Chinese students, though I have heard that some programs do have a lot of them. If that worries you, check the school’s website before you apply. They often publish a breakdown by nationality, and if they don’t, you can email the school and ask. That’s worth trying if you don’t want to end up speaking Chinese all the time.

J: Right! It seems pretty common for people to arrive and only then discover how many students from mainland China or other Chinese-speaking students there are. You can avoid that by looking into it ahead of time or simply asking the school.

Yes! Last year one of my students who was going to study ESG had already received an offer and was getting ready to leave when he saw one of those videos. He asked me what to do, and I told him to email the school. The school wrote back about the ESG program, and the general picture is this: art and business schools (I’m not sure about art, but definitely business) have a lot of Chinese and, more broadly, Asian students. When British people say “Asian” they usually mean South Asia, so India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, rather than East Asia. Students from those regions and from East Asia make up a big share because we like studying business.

Asia also has a large share of the world’s population, so you’ll run into Asian students wherever you go. On top of that, Asians like business school and British students mostly don’t. There’s a funny saying I only heard for the first time last year: “If a British student is talented, they study art, music or drama. If they’re smart and like research, they go into science. People with no talent go to business school.” That’s me: no talent, no gift for research, not an artistic bone in my body, so business school it was. I thought it was a pretty interesting way to see it.

Locals also don’t seem to do master’s degrees very often, because a master’s doesn’t do much for them. One reason we do one is the visa. We use study abroad as a stepping stone into the job market. Some people want to stay and work for two or three years, and others are aiming for permanent residency or even immigration. Because we have that need, we go through a master’s. Of course, some people genuinely want to go deep into a field that Taiwan doesn’t have the resources for, and that’s why they do a master’s.

But if you’re only thinking about jobs in the UK, say joining an e-commerce company or doing a regular job after graduation, you don’t really need a master’s unless you plan to continue to a PhD. I think that’s probably also why you see such a high share of Asian and Chinese students.

Most people who study abroad want to leave their comfort zone. If you want to connect with classmates from other cultures and not end up speaking Chinese every day, what should you do?

Try not to speak Chinese in daily life or when you’re discussing group projects. When groups are being formed, watch a little and you’ll notice that some people can only speak Chinese. Their English really isn’t there, and some may not even have taken their own exams to get in. Try to avoid working with them, and you’ll probably grow more.

It also depends on which country you go to. In the UK or the US you’ll probably be speaking English, but if you’ve learned another language, you can speak that too, like Spanish, French or Japanese. It’s less about avoiding people and more about your goal. If your goal is to practice English, make friends who will practice English with you.

What was the biggest thing you learned or felt during your time at Manchester? Was anything different from what you expected before you left?

A global outlook! That’s where growing up in Taiwan puts us at a disadvantage. Over 90% of people in Taiwan are ethnically Chinese. I once looked it up and I think it was 96 or 97%, which is very high. Our culture is fairly uniform and not as diverse as the UK or the US.

I have a little story. It didn’t happen at Manchester, but it was my first longer stay abroad, during an exchange in Belgium. I was chatting with a Mexican classmate and casually said “America” when I meant the United States, and his face froze. He was clearly upset.

He said, “We’re American too. You can’t call the US America! The whole continent is America!” I was a bit shocked, because back in Taiwan so much of what we see on TV and in the media comes from an American point of view, and nobody seems to think about how other countries feel about it.

Another example is from the UK, which has a lot of South Asian immigrants from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Something I found interesting is that many “Indian” restaurants in the UK aren’t run by Indians. They call themselves an Indian restaurant or Indian cuisine, but they’re actually run by Bangladeshis. I found that pretty unusual!

I think the biggest thing studying abroad taught me was to break out of my narrow way of thinking. I learned to look at the world more broadly, not only from a Chinese-speaking point of view.

Life abroad involves a lot of small talk, and people say the British love talking about the weather, sports and pets. You’ve studied and worked in the UK. Do you have any tips for small talk or for making friends with locals?

I have two tips! The first is to be culturally sensitive. The British care a lot about this, even in admissions. When I was helping a student apply to Imperial, I noticed a line on Imperial’s website saying they prefer culturally sensitive students, meaning you’re open to and respectful of other cultures.

The UK is a lot like the US in that it has many immigrants, many ethnicities and many different backgrounds. When you talk, be careful not to explain other people’s behavior through your own assumptions, because they may not have meant it that way.

Here’s an example from a group project at Manchester. I don’t remember the exact details, but our group had two Taiwanese, two British students and one Thai student (by “Taiwanese,” “British” and so on I mean the passport they held). One of the Taiwanese guys was abroad for the first time, and at one point he said, “In Taiwan, Filipinos work as domestic helpers,” or something like that.

It came across as a bit discriminatory, and one of the British students replied, “What about Filipinos? My mom is Filipino.” The Taiwanese guy was stunned. He hadn’t realized his classmate was mixed race, with a British father and a mother who had immigrated from the Philippines. So you really need to watch what you say. The best thing is to genuinely respect other cultures and not hold discriminatory views at all. But if you do catch yourself thinking that way, at least try not to show it when you speak. That moment was really awkward.

Then there’s diversity in gender and sexuality. Yesterday I was watching a TV show about finding homes for stray dogs, and one of the people on it was a guy from Malaysia. He said he felt he could never come out in Malaysia because he’s gay, and since moving to the UK he’s been very happy. There are quite a few Asians like that in the UK. A colleague at a previous job was also gay, and he was Chinese, but he didn’t want to go back to China. I’m not sure whether it’s illegal there or what the situation is, but he didn’t want to go back. He wanted to stay in the UK because he’s happier there.

So you need to keep ethnicity, nationality, gender and much more in mind, especially during small talk. My second tip is to watch more British TV and films! Netflix has different catalogs in different countries, and in Taiwan it’s hard to find British shows because there aren’t many. You can use a VPN, and watching more British shows will help you fit in once you move to the UK.

J: So with a VPN you really get a lot more choice?

Yes! It’s completely different. When my boyfriend and I lived in Taipei, he was a heavy VPN user because he doesn’t like Asian dramas. They’re not the style he’s used to. People in Taiwan love Korean and Japanese dramas. I like Japanese dramas myself, and some of my friends love Korean ones. But my boyfriend can’t stand the melodrama in Korean shows: some tycoon fighting over an inheritance, someone falling from North Korea into South Korea. He thinks it’s too ridiculous and just can’t watch it.

And when I watch Japanese dramas, he thinks the plots are strange. Why don’t the couple just say what they think? Why do they keep everything bottled up? That’s very different from how the British do things. I find the British interesting. We tend to think of them as reserved and understated. But my boyfriend once read a book on cross-cultural communication to help him adjust to working in Taiwan, and it said that among English-speaking countries like Australia, New Zealand, the US, Canada and the UK, the British count as very reserved. Compare them with Taiwanese and Japanese people, though, and the British are the outgoing ones! Taiwan and Japan are far more introverted and reserved. That showed up in his workplace communication. When he discussed a project with the people on his team, they felt too embarrassed to say directly what they thought.

Say they were discussing how to write a piece of code. His report would share his opinion only with a lot of hedging. As a manager with a British background, my boyfriend found this frustrating because he couldn’t tell what the person wanted to say and would assume it meant “this is fine.” He also had this belief that “the British are very reserved,” but he forgot where he sits on the spectrum. Among English speakers he’s on the reserved end. Put him in Asia and he isn’t. I find that pretty funny!

J: I think when we watch Netflix in Taiwan, the only British show we can find is probably The Crown.

Right, but The Crown isn’t about ordinary people’s lives. If you want to learn English from it, I’d suggest you don’t copy that British accent, because it’s very posh and people don’t like that. “Posh” means upper-class, aristocratic, rich kid. In Taiwan, calling someone a “rich second generation” is an insult too. You picture someone who shows off and drives too fast, kind of a bad boy. The British don’t like people who are too posh because it makes you sound distant. So I don’t really recommend picking up the accent from The Crown. It actually sounds strange.

People will actually wonder what’s wrong with you. When I was studying at Manchester, there was an Asian classmate who worked incredibly hard on his English and his accent, and he had no Asian accent at all. But his accent was the one from The Crown, and when we did a group project, the British students who had grown up there all thought he was odd. They wondered why he talked like that. He’d overdone it and sounded too proper! Imagine having dinner with a friend in Taiwan who talks like a news anchor reading the headlines. That sounds weird.

J: Like we’re all chatting and one person is enunciating every word of Mandarin perfectly and with great effort?

Exactly. And I don’t think you should force it. Once you get to know British people, ask them what they think of an American accent. They’ll tell you it sounds weird. They make fun of each other’s accents all the time. Once you’re abroad, accent turns out not to matter much, really not at all. As long as people understand you, you’re fine.

J: For me, at first I felt that Asians or Taiwanese had an accent when speaking English, so I didn’t dare speak up much. But once I actually got out there and talked to people, I realized everyone has an accent. There’s no need to be afraid. Just go ahead and speak!

I don’t think an accent is necessarily a bad thing. Some accents are even considered sexy, like a French accent or a Latin accent. People find them cool, interesting and attractive.

J: So should we learn a French accent, then?

No, you don’t need to spend a lot of time on that. Build your technical English skills. If you can express what you mean accurately, that’s enough! There’s no need to deliberately change your accent unless you have a specific reason, like acting in theater or a job that requires it. In everyday life I don’t think it’s worth imitating a particular accent.

Looking for a job in the UK

More and more international students hope to find work abroad through their degree, and Celia’s first job was in the UK. What did your job search timeline look like during your UK master’s?

I started fairly early. I began preparing as soon as I arrived in the UK: setting up LinkedIn, writing my resume and applying for jobs. If I did it again, though, the ideal timeline, and probably the most useful one for listeners, is to finish your resume and set up LinkedIn while you’re still in Taiwan. Get all of that done before you fly to the country where you’ll study.

As for applications and interviews, a UK master’s has three terms. In the first term you can apply for graduate schemes. In Taiwan these are a bit like management trainee programs. Firms such as McKinsey, BCG, Unilever and IBM may start recruiting a year in advance because their hiring process is long. In your first term, focus on that type of role. There’s no point applying for regular full-time jobs yet because it’s too early. Regular roles don’t recruit a year ahead. Only these specific programs do.

So the first term is for graduate schemes. In the second term, if you’ve been rejected from those, you can apply for regular full-time jobs. But don’t put too much pressure on yourself. Some people stress so much that they perform worse, so rest when you need to. The UK now has the Graduate visa, which gives you two more years after graduation to look for work, so you don’t have to start with a full-time role.

If you have no full-time work experience at all, you can start with an internship and convert it to a full-time role. That works too! There’s no need to make yourself depressed and anxious. What made it painful for me was that the Graduate visa didn’t exist yet, and that’s why my timeline looked the way it did. Without it, I graduated in December and my visa expired in March, and then I had to pack up and leave. I couldn’t stay in the UK, so my timeline was very rushed.

With the Graduate visa, you can focus on graduate schemes in the first term and start looking for full-time roles in the second or even third term, and that’s fine. You could also look for an internship in the third term and convert it later. You can even apply for the following year’s graduate schemes in the third term, around July or August when you’re writing your dissertation and about to graduate. Graduate schemes don’t set an age limit, because that would be age discrimination.

Taiwan does seem to have limits, such as no more than a certain number of years since graduation, but the UK is fairly relaxed about it. I’ve heard of people who had already worked for years and then went back to compete for graduate scheme roles.

People often say marketing is the hardest business field for finding work abroad, because it depends so much on understanding local culture and communicating in the local language, and you’re competing with locals. You studied marketing too. How did you land a job in the UK? Which soft and hard skills can we build to beat local candidates?

Competing on soft skills is too hard! You’re unlikely to beat people who grew up there, especially in social media or content marketing. I got offers for two jobs back then. One was in ad buying. The other was at a Taiwanese beauty e-commerce company in the UK, a British beauty e-commerce business targeting the Taiwanese market, which needed a native Mandarin speaker.

For the ad buying job, your English has to be good, but I don’t think you need to be a native. The other job needed someone who understood the Taiwanese market. For Taiwanese candidates, I think social media roles are just extremely hard to get.

Ask yourself a few questions. Can you name five well-known British influencers in the industry you’re applying to? If you can’t (and you usually can’t, because you don’t know who they are), or if you can’t name five well-known, trusted British media outlets in that industry, then you can’t compete with British candidates. Unless you grew up there and know the UK well. Even though I’ve been in the UK a bit longer now, not that long, I still couldn’t name them. I might know a few celebrities, and that’s it.

So the other angle is to go quant. Take the data route: ad buying, data analytics, business analytics. I think Taiwanese candidates have a better chance of standing out there. I’ve noticed the same in the US: many of the people who found jobs there landed roles like these. You probably need to combine marketing with other disciplines, or rather bring in your own strengths, to outshine local candidates. On soft skills alone you can’t beat them, because their English will always be better than yours and they understand the local market better.

So I think ad buying is well worth trying, especially if you already have work experience in Taiwan, because employers here put a lot of weight on experience. I think they value work experience more than your degree. That’s why I said earlier that if I could do it again, I would definitely work in Taiwan for a few years before applying for a UK master’s. And if I’d done that, I would also have had the Graduate visa. But you can’t go back in time. I didn’t know any of this then, so I just went for it.

J: And it worked out, haha 😂

Well, success and failure depend on the person. Did I succeed? Not really. In the end I worked there for a while and then moved back to Taiwan for family reasons. So I don’t think there’s a fixed definition. Nobody’s life goes smoothly. It twists and turns like a ball of yarn and never goes in a straight line from the bottom to the top. You’ll take several detours, and sometimes it may feel like your life is on pause. That’s okay, because it’s like that for everyone!

Even the people who look polished on social media, with top schools all the way and great jobs, have taken detours too. They just don’t show it, maybe because of how they want their feed to look. Very few people show their vulnerable side, because it feels too exposed, too painful and too embarrassing!

J: I agree! Celia shares a lot of very candid reflections on YouTube. They feel real, and a lot of international students can relate to them. I’d recommend checking out Celia’s YouTube channel.

The easiest thing is to only talk about the good parts. But I later looked back at my own YouTube videos and realized I’d been following keywords and data too much. Everything had to be a success story, and only a certain path would attract viewers. That isn’t how things really go! One of my students recently worked really hard and made it to the UK for school, and then found it very different from what he’d imagined. What he’d imagined was all stuff social media had pushed and fed to him.

Sometimes I think social media really is like a digital drug. It keeps pushing things at you to give you a jolt and make you feel good. When you scroll, you think that’s what the world looks like, but it may be the top 1% or even 0.1%. The real world doesn’t look like that.

So whichever country you study in, I really encourage you to go out and experience the society you’re living in for yourself, not the one you see on social media. That version is different and not real.

On YouTube, Celia has a series about UK job hunting and visas for international students. What visas can international students get after graduating in the UK? What is the Graduate visa, and how does it relate to permanent residency? Are there other work visa options in Europe that UK graduates can try, so they don’t have to look only in the UK?

Sure! For many people who study in the UK, the ideal path looks like this. Whether you come for a bachelor’s or a master’s, you get a Student visa. After Brexit, around 2021, the government introduced a new Graduate visa. That didn’t exist before. When I was studying there was only the Student visa, and once it ended you had to find a company to sponsor you if you wanted to stay.

Now you get a two-year Graduate visa after you graduate, or three years if you finish a PhD. During those two or three years you don’t need an employer to sponsor you. You can work full-time in the UK, or do nothing at all, travel, or study. Before the Graduate visa runs out, you need an employer to sponsor you so you can switch to a Skilled Worker visa, which is basically a white-collar work visa. After five years on the Skilled Worker visa, you can apply for permanent residency in the UK. Permanent residency means you can come and go freely and live, work and rent in the UK without any problem. But you’re not a citizen yet. You can become a British citizen after holding permanent residency for a year. Whether that’s worth it depends on your situation. If you have tax considerations, you might decide whether you really need citizenship or whether permanent residency is enough.

Taiwan works in a similar way. If you marry someone in Taiwan or hold a work visa there, it’s also five years for most jobs. Some European countries are shorter. A friend of mine who works as a data scientist in Germany told me it took about a year or two, some number under three years, before you can switch to EU permanent residence, commonly called the Blue Card. The US has the green card and the EU has the Blue Card. With it you can move freely and work in EU countries. It’s a similar idea.

One thing people often get wrong is that time on a Graduate visa or Student visa doesn’t count toward the five years for permanent residency. The five years have to be on the same type of visa, such as a partner visa if you marry a local, or a Skilled Worker visa sponsored by a company. You need five years on the same visa to qualify. You can’t combine two years on a student visa with a Skilled Worker visa. That doesn’t count! Student time doesn’t count, and neither does the Graduate visa.

Another route is the working holiday. Taiwan and the UK have the Youth Mobility Scheme. People aged 18 to 30 can enter a ballot, which runs twice a year, around January to February and July to August. If you’re selected, you get a two-year YMS visa in the UK. That’s what I’m on right now, commonly called the working holiday visa, though the official name is the Youth Mobility Scheme.

That also doesn’t count toward permanent residency, so keep that in mind. As for Europe, plenty of people want to study there too, and there’s one thing many don’t know. In the Netherlands, if you hold a master’s degree from a university in the world’s top 200, you can apply for a one-year Dutch job-seeker visa and spend a year looking for work there. So you don’t need to study abroad for that. If you already have a degree from a top-200 university in Taiwan, you can apply to the Netherlands directly.

J: So UK permanent residency is pretty hard to get?

I think it’s one of the harder ones in the world! Even if everything goes smoothly, say I go from a Student visa to a Graduate visa, work a few years, and finally get a Skilled Worker visa, I still have to start counting five years from scratch before I can get permanent residency. And you may not even want to live in the UK. After a few years you might decide the weather is too awful. I think the weather is a big factor, especially if you grew up in Taiwan. If you’re from Keelung, where it rains all the time, you might not mind. But if you’re from Kaohsiung or Tainan, I think you’d find the UK unbearable. The weather really is bad. The sky is dark and never really bright. Maybe a few summer months are sunny, but most of the time it looks like a British TV show, all dark and gloomy. That’s British weather.

J: Does that make people depressed?

Yes! People in the Nordic countries get winter depression easily, because in winter you never see the sun. It’s dark when you get up and go to work, and it’s dark when you leave work. It’s light while you’re at work, but you can’t go outside.

Most people think finding a job in the UK is extremely hard. You’ve interviewed many people who succeeded in landing jobs abroad. In general, what do you think made them successful? What do they have in common that lets them outshine other candidates?

Willpower! You need a firm resolve and a really strong reason for staying in the UK. For many people it isn’t that they can’t stay. They just feel life in Taiwan is better, so they don’t want to stay. Life in Taiwan is more comfortable, the food is better, and your family and friends are there. You need a clear, strong reason to stay in the UK.

The second thing I’ve noticed is that many of them like giving back. Whether something went well or badly for them, they’re happy to share it so others can avoid the same potholes. The third is that they’re all grateful. None of them says, “I got the job because I’m amazing.” They always say they’re thankful for the people who helped them.

Those are the three things I’ve seen in the people I know who work in the UK. Quite a lot of UK international students don’t end up staying. Some people wanted to stay even before they went abroad, and it really was their willpower that pushed them, step by step, to find work there.

J: So you think willpower is the one thing all these successful job seekers need?

Yes! You need a very clear reason to stay, and it has to be one that no other place could satisfy.

Why Celia became a study-abroad consultant

Why did you want to become a study-abroad consultant? After returning to Taiwan you worked as a bank MA, then started your own business as an independent consultant. What made you go independent, and what have you learned in the year or two since?

Honestly, the main reason I left the bank MA program was that I got picked in the YMS working holiday ballot. I planned to go straight back to the UK and work, either in my old job or something new. But my partner had a visa issue in Taiwan: he had to stay one more year to qualify for permanent residency there. I only found that out after I’d already quit. So for that transition period I thought, why not try study-abroad consulting? It’s something I’d always wanted to do. Making YouTube videos gave me a strong sense of achievement. The money is tiny, because YouTube barely pays anything (close to zero), but my viewers are lovely and give me very positive feedback. They tell me my videos helped them plan their job search timeline or understand something, and that makes me feel I’m doing something worthwhile.

It might also be my personality. I’m a highly sensitive person. When the 16 MBTI personality types were popular, I came out as INFJ, the Advocate. I love helping people and doing things that are useful, so I felt this kind of work would suit me. And it happened to be a very flexible job during that transition period.

The bank job had its good points. You could predict what you’d be doing ten years from now, the path was very stable, and the pay and benefits were pretty good by Taiwanese standards. But you had to be obedient and follow the career path exactly. You knew precisely what lay ahead, so there wasn’t much flexibility, and there wasn’t much room to be creative or make your own decisions. My personality is the opposite: I like working on my own and creating things. It wasn’t that I did badly there. I actually did very well. It just went against who I am.

So when you’re looking for work, try to understand yourself first. If you don’t know yourself yet, that’s fine too. Try a few different types of jobs, and one day, after enough experience, you’ll know. I went through at least seven different phases and three full-time jobs, and only after all those wrong turns did I figure out what suits me.

Being an independent consultant gives me a lot of flexibility and freedom with my time. I can start working the moment I get up, and I don’t have to go into an office. I can work until midnight if I need to, fitting around my students’ schedules. I also travel a lot because of my partner. He has to go abroad twice a year, and we also visit family in the UK, so we travel at least four or five times a year. This job fits my life right now.

You’ve said that even as a consultant, you often talk students out of studying abroad. You help them work out why they want to go and whether they need to at all. How do you guide them to uncover their interests, career goals and real reasons for studying abroad?

I really enjoy talking with students! Everyone is different. Being highly sensitive has its downsides, but in this job it helps, because I can pick up very subtle feelings, even just from someone’s voice.

One weakness of education in Taiwan is that there’s always a standard answer. That’s how we’re taught from a young age. In the UK, a lot of the time there’s no standard answer. They ask you to come up with questions or explore freely, with no right or wrong. Taiwan loves multiple choice. From childhood on, our exams are full of multiple-choice questions, and there’s always one correct answer.

I don’t know whether that’s the reason or whether other cultural factors are involved, but East Asian students like to follow the crowd, for example with rankings. You see it in marketing too. When I worked in the UK, I noticed that European marketing is very different from marketing in Taiwan. Taiwanese brands love putting a country’s name in front of a product name or making rankings, the number one analyst, the number two analyst. You see that less in the UK. British people are more independent and like to choose what suits them, so what they buy is more varied. In East Asia, places like Taiwan, Japan and Korea, we like having a standard answer. Number one is best, so I’ll buy number one. People just pick the top one or two without thinking, and because everyone is so similar, a standard answer forms easily.

Many Taiwanese students don’t actually need to study abroad. What they need may be a trip to Europe, a short study tour or a working holiday. But the study-abroad industry in Taiwan is a bit too developed and its marketing is very strong. It’s packaged as if everyone has somewhere to go. Not everyone has that need or the money to study abroad.

So the first thing I always ask is: what’s your goal? If you can reach it without studying abroad, then you don’t need to study abroad, and there’s no need to spend millions of NT dollars on it. Money is hard to earn these days. A working holiday may be better. I often chat with people in free consultations and tell them a working holiday suits them better. They’re still young enough to enter the working holiday ballot. They can experience life in another country and earn money at the same time. Rather than doing a degree you don’t need, go on a working holiday, or work for a few years first and then see whether you need to study abroad. Also, when you read social media posts, think about who wrote them. Some people genuinely want to help you, but others have a financial interest. They might earn a big commission for sending you to a particular school. So before reading anything, ask yourself who wrote it and what their motive is.

J: Yes! I completely agree. People often overlook this and end up absorbing biased or inaccurate information. I’ve heard from students who used some of the bigger agencies, and what they told me was that the agency’s role and their own direction for the application turned out to be completely different. The agency thinks its job is to take the money and complete the task, getting every application document written. But as a student, you should do thorough research, understand your needs and goals, and write a document that scores better than 100 out of 100! The agency only finishes your documents and gets you into an okay school, and then its job is done.

I think you should look at the other party. Not every agency is good or bad. But you can look at their incentives and how they make money, their business model. If you studied business, you know the business model canvas, and they must have a way to make money. For some agencies, the student isn’t the customer but the product. Their customer is the school. In that case you’re not their customer, so why would they serve you? They’ll serve the school.

That’s the reality, and it’s worth thinking about. Of course, some people just need someone to handle the admin, and a regular agency is fine for that. They don’t need anyone very skilled. If they can do a good job on their own, then it doesn’t matter.

You’ve coached so many students. What’s the most common big problem you see in their SOPs?

With undergraduates, meaning applicants with little work experience, a lot of them have never really asked themselves why they want to do this master’s. One idea I find quite useful is to think of the master’s as a bridge between who you are now and who you will be. If you can already do what your future self can do, you don’t need the degree.

Much of your SOP should focus on what your gap is and how this master’s will help fill it so you can reach your career aspiration. If you tell that story well, your SOP will usually turn out well.

J: I was impressed that Celia takes on a limited number of clients as a consultant and relies on word of mouth. She rarely advertises.

Yes, honestly it feels like charity work. I did think about joining the commission game, but I decided I couldn’t. The moment I take commissions, my perspective changes. It has nothing to do with whether you’re a good or bad person. It’s just how it works: wherever your income comes from is the direction you’ll lean. So I firmly decided not to take commissions. I’m actually thinking about taking on a side job lately, doing some other work, because otherwise I might go broke.

J: Right. Celia helps students apply to UK business schools, and many UK schools pay commissions or referral bonuses to consultants and agencies. So you went through some soul-searching and chose not to work with schools so you could stay on the students’ side?

Yes. Sometimes I wish I were a shrewd businessperson, but I’m just not. I can’t do it. Still, I don’t think commissions are always bad, because sometimes everyone benefits. If the school pays the agency, the student may not have to pay an agency fee. In my case I can’t skip charging a consulting fee, because without it my income would be zero, literally zero. So I have to balance things: not charge too much, not starve, and not take commissions. I did put some thought into my pricing.

For listeners who want to see more of Celia’s videos or her daily life, where can they find you?

On YouTube I’m Celia Chou. You can watch my free videos there, and more details are on my website, celiachou.com.

Thank you so much, Celia, for joining Jason’s Career Folder and sharing so much about job hunting in the UK and your move in Taiwan from bank MA to independent study-abroad consultant. You gave a lot of practical analysis on whether students should study abroad at all, and, if you do, how to plan your time when looking for work abroad. I hope everyone comes away from this episode seeing how much can be planned early, and that it prompts you to reflect on yourself and find the direction you want to work toward.

That’s it for this episode. If you enjoyed it, please give me a five-star rating, leave a comment and share it! If you’d like to talk with me about anything or apply to be a guest, send me a DM on Instagram. You might be chosen for an episode and add your own folder. See you next time, bye!