Building Something That Lasts: A Princeton Intern's Summer at TCC

Rostyslav Yarnyk｜Summer Intern of Digital Intelligence Navigators (DIN)

When I landed in Taipei in late June, I had a rough idea of what a summer internship would look like: a defined task, a desk, and a polite goodbye at the end. What I got instead was seven of the most formative weeks of my education so far, and a genuine reluctance to get on the plane home.

I spent the summer with the Digital Intelligence Navigators (DIN) department, working on digital intelligence initiative aimed at deepening the background of TCC's employees. What made the experience exceptional wasn't just the scope of the work. It was the mentorship. From my first week, I was treated less like an intern to be managed and more like an engineer whose judgement mattered. My mentors gave me real ownership of a real deliverable, then made themselves available every time I hit a wall, and I hit plenty. They asked me why I'd chosen an approach before telling me whether it was right, which forced me to defend my reasoning and, more often than not, improve it. That habit of thinking has followed me into everything I've built since.

I had pleasure working with two other interns. Our project was an automated weekly technology intelligence newsletter for the cement and concrete industry. The system ingests articles from sixteen curated sources, including trade press, industry outlets, and peer-reviewed journals like Cement and Concrete Research. It then uses large language models to filter, classify, and summarize what matters, translate it into Traditional Chinese, and assemble everything into a branded email that reaches colleagues across the organization. Along the way we designed the workflow architecture, integrated a PostgreSQL layer for article storage and deduplication, tuned a hybrid model strategy to keep costs to a few U.S. dollars a month, and debugged more edge cases than we could count. The finished pipeline saves roughly six hours of manual creation every week.

The technical skills were real, but the transferrable ones mattered more. I learned how to scope an ambiguous problem into buildable stages, how to test as I went rather than at the end, and how to explain a technical system to an audience that cares about outcomes rather than architecture. Those skills have already changed how I approach my own work. I now design personal projects the way we designed this one: modular, tagged, and validated at every step. That shift has made me far more effective engineer than I was in June, and it has directly shaped the direction I'm taking my career.

What surprised me the most, though, was the company itself. I arrived with a perception of cement as a carbon intensive industry, and I left understanding TCC as one of the most serious decarbonization efforts I've encountered anywhere. The commitment to net zero by 2050, validated against the SBTi 1.5°C pathway, is not a line in the annual report here. It shows up in low carbon product lines, in alternative fuels and clinker substitution, in carbon capture research, and in green energy and storage business that has become a genuine second pillar of the company rather than a side project.

The part I'll remember is how thoroughly those goals are embedded in daily work. In meetings that had nothing formally to do with sustainability, I watched colleagues weigh decisions against other carbon implications by reflex. Ambition at the top only matters if it survives contact with the calendar of an ordinary Tuesday, and at TCC it does. That is rare, and it is the strongest thing I can say about a company's culture.

I also fell for Taiwan. The warmth here is not performative. Strangers walked me to destinations rather than pointing, colleagues invited me out simply because I was new, and every clumsy attempt at Mandarin was met with encouragement rather than impatience. And the food deserves its own article: night market beef noodle soup, xiaolongbao that ruined me for the version back home, mango shaved ice on days when Taipei's humidity made it necessary, and more excellent breakfast egg crepes than I can justify.

I'm deeply grateful to TCC for an opportunity that let me grow professionally while living inside a culture I'd only read about, and, just as valuably, share a bit of mine along the way. I came to help build a newsletter. I'm leaving with a great deal more than that.
 

AUTHOR

Rostyslav Yarnyk |

Summer Intern of Digital Intelligence Navigators (DIN)

(Princeton in Asia Intern · Electrical & Computer Engineering, Princeton University)

I'm a Princeton Junior studying Electrical & Computer Engineering with a minor in Finance, here in Taipei through the Princeton in Asia internship program. I'm fascinated by where technology and finance overlap, and I spend most of my time watching sports. I follow FC Barcelona and the New York Knicks, which means I have made peace with waking up at strange hours.