“What class are you going to?” asked one of my friends, a fellow political science major.
“I’m going to my fine arts class,” I casually replied.
“Why do you take an arts class? Are you taking it for fun?”
“Well, yes and no. I have to take it to graduate, but I also enjoy it,” I said truthfully.
“Why would you have to take an arts class? You study political science,” he said.
“Yeah, and it’s part of my general education requirements.”
“That seems errr, stupid.”
You know, as education systems go, I’ve come to the knowledge that I like and prefer mine. Though I’m sure that many, many people back home would argue this point with me, the fact that the vast majority of university students in the United States receive liberal arts educations is a competitive advantage as critical thought goes as well as important to that development of critical thought.
Now, as I can foresee, there are two points of contention that can arise from this: first that most all higher education in the United States can be called liberal arts and second that it is actually something positive and advantageous in the long run.
Let me first define liberal arts as I see fit. I understand full well that in the United States, liberal arts on the layperson’s level almost always refers to the liberal arts colleges (not universities, because they don’t confer graduate degrees), wherein professors teach small classes and instead of researching, professors just teach. As such, liberal arts colleges tend to be small themselves. They pride themselves on learning for the sake of knowledge and having knowledge for the sake of knowledge, which I can and do fully believe in.
That’s where I’m going to break it off. Though a liberal arts college teaches liberal arts, not all institutions that teach liberal arts are liberal arts colleges—in fact, the whole higher education set up of the United States is based on the liberal arts education and continues to become more and more so—and I like it.
So what exactly is a liberal arts education? In my understanding, the result is that you get a well-rounded knowledge base upon which to draw from, but what is most important is that you come up with well-rounded (profound and thoughtful) opinions and decisions, based on the fact that nothing in the world it of itself with nothing else. Philosophically speaking, the liberal arts education gives students a real-world education with the ability to analyze relations better than say someone who went to a vocational school, which trains you only for your job.
And that’s the alternative, or one of the alternatives. Vocational school in the United States refers to professions that require more technical skill over critical thought. Don’t get me wrong, because I believe that people who go to vocational school and people who hold jobs of any sort make the world go round, but vocational school is for the nitty gritty professions, like those of mechanics and plumbers.
So where do the rest of us fit in? Well, we get well-rounded educations. This means that we have general education requirements and often areas of specialization (on top of majors). In addition, general education requirements are often done in the first two years, which means that the breadth of disciplines that a student is exposed to can help him or her decide what to major in. And before you say, well, doesn’t everybody have general education requirements?, that’s a no.
As I understand, here at HKU, there are hardly any general education requirements as we would understand in the United States. They have one broad set of classes labeled “GE: General Education” but notices that the word “requirements” is left off. GEs are not required it appears. In that sense, the university curriculum (in addition to the primary and secondary school curriculums) are based heavily on the English.
In this sense, you are forced into specialization soon after you enter university, which I find bizarre. To start, their major curriculums are three years, whereas in the United States the typical time to graduate with a bachelor’s degree is supposed to be four years.
And that’s not specialization in just major—it’s more like career. Take a look at professional degrees in the United States—most are graduate degrees that require an undergraduate degree to apply for. Architecture, as one of the few fields left whose professional degree is undergraduate, might become a graduate degree soon. I recently read an article that the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards was investigating making it so, much in the same way law was made a doctorate back in the day.
Lawyers are doctors too (at least in the United States). Since the late nineteenth century, you have to earn a Juris Doctor (JD) degree to be eligible to take the bar in any state and thereby become licensed to practice. This means that you have to first get an undergraduate degree, and then go to law school for six semesters.
In England, as I understand, as well as many historically English-ruled countries, law is firmly an undergraduate (albeit professional) degree. Straight out of high school, English students can (if so accepted) go straight into law. After for studying for three years in a classroom and a doing year of practical (the substitute for the American bar), you become a fully qualified lawyer. Similarly, medical students study for five years as undergraduates (four in the United States), and then do their practical for however many years. Because of this, both physicians and lawyers start out younger in England than in the United States.
Some would say “Yay! More money for retirement!” but I think that if you spent so many fewer years on education, you’re inherently less educated than someone whose spent more. It’s like child prodigies who end up graduating college at the age of 13. They may have the same practical knowledge as a 21-year-old of the same qualifications, but do they really have an equal amount of life experience that truly enhances your education? I think not.
On a related note, in the last lecture of my Hong Kong and the World class, we had the pro-vice-chancellor of the university at our disposal as a guest speaker, and the main topic of the discussion was the education reform currently underway in Hong Kong.
As a background note, secondary education is becoming one year shorter and university education is becoming one year longer (in a timed manner). This means that in fall 2012, the nine universities of Hong Kong will be taking in two classes (for two different curriculums), or a 40% increase in students over the previous term and the previous year. The universities are all expanding their campuses as able to accommodate this increase.
Current university students overall seem to be pretty apathetic, since it’s not immediately affecting them. But in any situation like this one, students who have opinions tend to harbor strong feelings.
I love my university, and I appreciate what is being done for me. I wish that more often more people would be appreciative just of the air around them. I love my university, but besides reasons of gratitude, I couldn’t tell you why. The university isn’t a person, but a group of people, so I suppose my love would be for the environment, for (the majority of) the people.
In our last Hong Kong and the World class, one local student expressed a very strong dislike (or at least severely neutral) opinion of the University of Hong Kong. Now, HKU isn’t my university per say (though I registered with the alumni office at their request), but I see no reason not to love it. Though it is structured differently than UCSD, I can firmly see that a university is a university. I’m not so sure she can quantify her lack of affection for HKU either, much in the same way that I cannot quantify my affection for UCSD.
There are plenty of UCSD students who hate UCSD, but they tend to back up their feelings or opinions based on the liberal arts classes that they are forced to take, Making of the Modern World that one day I hope they will appreciate having taken.
In all honesty, I can’t really fully appreciate that student’s lack of affection for the university. Though I never asked her personally, she said to the pro-vice-chancellor that she believes her workload is far to heavy. (Although I have been here for only one semester, I can say that my full course load is producing far less work that I’ve had back at UCSD.)
So there’s haters everywhere I suppose, and it doesn’t matter whose grass your on. I think though that the ultimate reason why I love my university is that I’m an appreciative, positive person who tries to see everything and tries to see everything with an open mind.
And let the statement never disappear that many UCSD professors notice the difference in writing and critical thought in papers from Eleanor Roosevelt College students.
In the development of the person, it would appear that time is more important than money.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Showing posts with label making of the modern world. Show all posts
Showing posts with label making of the modern world. Show all posts
Friday, December 4, 2009
Monday, July 20, 2009
Quality v. Quality
Somehow I wanted to insert this aspect of my college experience into this blog by making it relevant somehow. Here’s my shot. I have full confidence that I may express certain feelings without upsetting certain people, mostly because I am sure that most of those people are not reading my blog. Some will be glad to read this post and some might think I’m just being bitter. Please believe me when I say that I have no intention of either.
It goes back to when I was real, real little. I think it was my father who gave me an “I’m going to Harvard” rattle. Whether or not he was the giver is irrelevant. My father is one of those who “only wants the best” for me, he would say; and I do so believe in his intentions.
Entering middle school I was poised to get straight As, no doubt. In the big jump from sixth to seventh grade I guess I found myself at a crossroads. At the time it would have sounded silly to say this, and it sounds only a little less now that I’m 19, but I like (as in prefer) to think that that was the end of my formative years in a sense. From then, my opinions have changed; I grew a few feet (I think); I learned how to drive—but nothing unlike that in the course of one’s adult life. I was poised to get into Stanford and remained so until I was rejected in 2007, in December.
Was it stubborn optimism that turned (what I like to think was) misfortune into hope?
Needless to say, I didn’t get straight As in middle school, nor high school for that matter. On the bright side, I didn’t get any Cs (or lower), nor did my GPA ever dip below 3.6.
And here we get to the topic of today’s post. Yes, the two sides are both qualities. And I know I’m not alone in thinking that I have had to make some difficult decisions over the years between two (or more) perfectly and equally equitable situations. In my case, I was caught up by quantity due to my inability to make chose but a few of the many existing scenarios before me.
Was it a good decision on my part? My mother asserted to me, after it was all set and done, “You probably should have done less. I think you stretched yourself out too thin. You couldn’t concentrate on grades and now you aren’t going to be going to your top choice school.”
I replied, “I honestly wouldn’t have done anything different.” And true to my words, my mind didn’t and still doesn’t think anything different.
My seldom-existent inner romantic would say that the heart wants what the heart wants and the brain could not, at that time, overcome the wishes of the heart, for rationality was gone. The heart had become one with the brain and there was nothing to be done.
So in this post I plan to pose three major decisions of quality versus quality (with many minor ones) that I went through. You may disagree; you may agree. All I hope is that my logic shows in my actions, hopefully culminating in relevance to my upcoming study abroad experience.
My first was in middle school.
When I was approaching fifth grade, there was a decision of whether or not to go to middle school. State legislation had just promoted the sixth grade to middle school (junior high school) status. However, there was a large enough group of parents who wanted to keep their kids in elementary school for sixth grade that Westlake Hills Elementary School kept sixth grade.
Why not stay in elementary school for sixth grade? My parents, with my consent kept me at Westlake Hills for sixth grade.
A third of the way across the school district (and Thousand Oaks), a good friend of mine went to Meadows Elementary School. Their parents had voted to get rid of sixth grade entirely there. As such, my friend went to middle school one year before I did.
I got to middle school as a seventh grader in the fall of 2002. My good friend and I were still pretty chummy and I ate lunch with his group of friends for the first week or so. With good intentions (in middle-school sense) he told me that I was not to get all problems correct on a math test or homework, because that’s not cool. I was told to deliberately work every tenth problem or so wrong to this effect.
I decided not to follow this piece of advice. If I wanted a good circle of friends, they first would not fall for gimmicks that make me supposedly look cool. If they did, then they could be considered shallow, at least in part. Because of this decision, I worked hard throughout middle school. So much that I kept a full load of honors courses with a workload to match. In eighth grade, I found myself in honors science, a relatively hard class with a good teacher.
Back in the day we would get assigned seats, of course, and for one rotation I sat next to this kid who needed a bit of help. The bit turned into a lot of help, for which I was perfectly glad to assist, for we had become pretty good friends.
The next seating rotation, we did not sit next to each other any more. That was it for our friendship. I saw him outside of class one day and said hi to him, for which he ignored me in the presence of his cool friends and pretended not to know me.
Because I have chosen not to name this individual, I’ll finish out why I mentioned him. So seeing how he had befriended me for the help, I judged him as being dim-witted and in need of plenty of help. Two incidents thereafter solidified this opinion.
The first was at a dry Christmas party senior year of high school. All the party people, including myself, were seated outside in comical conversation circles. Within our own circles we were conversing with each other.
Now many of my good friends are female, so my conversation circle was pretty much girls plus me and this other guy. In an adjacent circle was a group of football and baseball jocks. With most all sports being segregated by sex, their conversation circle was comprised only of guys, if memory serves me right. In that group was the aforementioned science class “friend,” if you will. Now a star football player, he received a scholarship to (the) Cornell University in New York.
The group began poking fun at me behind my back. I don’t remember the exact dialogue, but it was nasty and I do not care to elaborate for sake of word choice, if you catch my drift. They persisted and then moved on to the other guy in my conversation circle, another friend of mine. He wasn’t so good at hiding that he was hearing the entire insult and controlled himself to stay seated in his chair.
What transpired between the aggressors and the aggressees is irrelevant, so I’ll let you speculate as to the outcome.
The second incident regarding this individual did not happen but half a year ago. By this time, he was in attendance at Cornell and knowing fully well that he was, as my dad likes to call people, an idiot, I was curious as to how he was faring.
It just so happens that I’m friends with his ex-girlfriend, who also attends UCSD. Knowing that they’d broken up because of his infidelity, I asked how he’s doing at Cornell. She said that he feels really stupid there, to which I was not surprised and suddenly finding trouble containing my running laughter.
My second was in high school.
Many of my old friends may sense what’s to come in this second major decision. They would always remark to me stuff like: “You’re so busy!” “I never see you outside of class,” or “Do you have any free time?”
At the end of eighth grade we were led through registration of classes for freshman year of high school—the upcoming year. I talked to a counselor there. She said that if I wanted to get into Stanford, I would have to work extra hard and find a passion that you revolve around. I did both, definitely, but what pushed my chances of getting over the edge to the other side of the curve was a little thing I like to call community service.
My parents used to tell me that I’m really spoiled. When they would utter it, I would hate it. Now, I would say that was somewhat true. While I did not receive everything I wanted, I received everything I needed plus more. I never received stuff like big screen TVs or video game consoles for free, as did many of my classmates, but I never had to fight for food or had to find shelter like so many 40 miles southeast of Thousand Oaks. I was not given a car when I turned 16 (or ever for that matter) but I was given near unlimited access of my parents’. Being a teenage male, my driver’s insurance rates were sky high, but my parents never asked me to get a job to help pay for it.
So I took a look at the world, so to speak. Knowing full well what many of the underprivileged do with their lives—starting on a low note and ending on a high—I should be expected to end on an even higher note, having started from a relatively high note to begin with.
From this basis, I changed in two ways. One is ongoing and the other has already pretty much happened.
The first is that I became addicted to community service. I figured that I should use my ability and good health to assist others and those less fortunate. This is still going on as I try hard to find time perform my passion for service. I donate blood whenever I can (and so should you!) though I won’t be able to donate again until January 2011 due to my recent trip to Europe and my upcoming trip to Hong Kong.
The other is liberal (in the American sense) views (much to the covert dismay of my Republican father). No one person is inherently better than another in the same way that no one country is inherently better than another. In no way should making money be the primary goal for anyone’s life. Why should one person live with $10,000 drapes on every window in every room when someone not halfway across the globe works tirelessly every day for basic necessities? How can the United States call itself a Christian nation and claim to be accepting people of all faiths at the same time? Or for that matter how can the United States claim to be accepting and fail to insure every individual the same civil rights as the next?
While I claim a dislike for the Republican Party, I do not claim a dislike for its individual members, nor conservatism as an ideology.
I included this because as I am a political science major, I intend to write heavily about politics, political economy, and globalization from Hong Kong.
So by the time I was finishing high school I had been involved with at least six organizations. I did community service throughout Boy Scouts of America, including a 440-man-hour, $2,500-budget project for Eagle Scout rank; American Red Cross (of Ventura County), where I was involved as Youth Services Chair on the Board of Directors and Westlake High School Club President; National Honor Society, which does service with a variety of local organizations; Ambassadors Club, for service to the school; Los Robles Hospital, where I assisted the friendly pharmacist with inventory and paperwork; and Thousand Oaks Youth Commission, which gave me an award.
Even though all this organizations dominated nearly every day after school, this alone did not cause me to not get the best of grades.
I had another addition—school. I know it sounds silly, but I had a thing for taking extra classes. Each and every year I took seven classes. Junior and senior years I took an additional class at Moorpark Community College. My final semester of senior I took two classes at Moorpark Community College for a grand total of 9 classes at during my final semester at Westlake High School.
At graduation I was not going to Stanford, I had a ton of community service hours (probably literally), I had a respectable GPA (though not respectable enough for the Ivys), and I was set to go to UCSD with a combined AP-community college transfer of 86 credits (4 shy of junior standing).
My third was in college.
I guess this last major decision was not so much of a decision as a justification. I had not gotten into Stanford or the Ivys. I came to Eleanor Roosevelt College at the University of California, San Diego, to make a name for myself with expectations and disappointments.
Now that I’ve spent my first year at UCSD people ask me how I like it. My response it always the same: my biggest problem with it is that too many people don’t think they belong there. Out of all the first-years I’ve talked to, I can only name a handful that say they want to and plan to graduate from UCSD. In fact, this past year I’ve had two roommates because my first transferred out after the first quarter.
The part that bothered me was that the reason they didn’t feel they belonged was because they felt they should have gotten into college elsewhere. I got plenty of Berekeleys and UCLAs as responses.
At first, I was poised to become one of the many who didn’t “belong.” But what good would that do? UCSD is a perfectly good school and actually turned out to offer a really good education in my interests.
As I’ve explained in previous posts my majors, I have been unable to find comparable programs at other universities; and at none have I been able to find a program as enriching as Making of the Modern World.
Which brings me to my next point. Students are lazy. Well, that’s not my point, but not only are students at UCSD feeling as if they don’t belong, my classmates feel like they’ve had an injustice done to them by being placed in Eleanor Roosevelt College.
Most of the hate for ERC (from those who hate) is directed at MMW. As I explained earlier, I really appreciate MMW. Most complain about its length. One spiteful Wikipedia author claimed that at six quarters, MMW is by far the longest core writing class of all of UCSD’s six colleges.
I dispute that claim. It is indeed the longest, but not by far. Revelle College has five quarters of Humanities (HUM), which appears to be a western cultures and literature course, and an additional quarter of American cultures, making their grand total six. Sixth College has three Culture, Art, and Technology (CAT) lower division classes plus a colloquium for a total of four. Marshall College has three quarters of Dimensions of Culture (DOC), which many Marshall students say is useless, and the administrators are considering adding a fourth. Warren College has two writing courses plus Ethics for a total of three. And Muir College has two writing courses plus American cultures for a total of three as well.
So where is this all going? Rarely in my actions and choices have I been overall lazy. The decision to study abroad was no exception. The mountain of paperwork, multiple applications, and the money, just to name a few things. So why do it? I guess ironically going away to another university for a while would enhance the quality of my education at UCSD.
It goes back to when I was real, real little. I think it was my father who gave me an “I’m going to Harvard” rattle. Whether or not he was the giver is irrelevant. My father is one of those who “only wants the best” for me, he would say; and I do so believe in his intentions.
Entering middle school I was poised to get straight As, no doubt. In the big jump from sixth to seventh grade I guess I found myself at a crossroads. At the time it would have sounded silly to say this, and it sounds only a little less now that I’m 19, but I like (as in prefer) to think that that was the end of my formative years in a sense. From then, my opinions have changed; I grew a few feet (I think); I learned how to drive—but nothing unlike that in the course of one’s adult life. I was poised to get into Stanford and remained so until I was rejected in 2007, in December.
Was it stubborn optimism that turned (what I like to think was) misfortune into hope?
Needless to say, I didn’t get straight As in middle school, nor high school for that matter. On the bright side, I didn’t get any Cs (or lower), nor did my GPA ever dip below 3.6.
And here we get to the topic of today’s post. Yes, the two sides are both qualities. And I know I’m not alone in thinking that I have had to make some difficult decisions over the years between two (or more) perfectly and equally equitable situations. In my case, I was caught up by quantity due to my inability to make chose but a few of the many existing scenarios before me.
Was it a good decision on my part? My mother asserted to me, after it was all set and done, “You probably should have done less. I think you stretched yourself out too thin. You couldn’t concentrate on grades and now you aren’t going to be going to your top choice school.”
I replied, “I honestly wouldn’t have done anything different.” And true to my words, my mind didn’t and still doesn’t think anything different.
My seldom-existent inner romantic would say that the heart wants what the heart wants and the brain could not, at that time, overcome the wishes of the heart, for rationality was gone. The heart had become one with the brain and there was nothing to be done.
So in this post I plan to pose three major decisions of quality versus quality (with many minor ones) that I went through. You may disagree; you may agree. All I hope is that my logic shows in my actions, hopefully culminating in relevance to my upcoming study abroad experience.
My first was in middle school.
When I was approaching fifth grade, there was a decision of whether or not to go to middle school. State legislation had just promoted the sixth grade to middle school (junior high school) status. However, there was a large enough group of parents who wanted to keep their kids in elementary school for sixth grade that Westlake Hills Elementary School kept sixth grade.
Why not stay in elementary school for sixth grade? My parents, with my consent kept me at Westlake Hills for sixth grade.
A third of the way across the school district (and Thousand Oaks), a good friend of mine went to Meadows Elementary School. Their parents had voted to get rid of sixth grade entirely there. As such, my friend went to middle school one year before I did.
I got to middle school as a seventh grader in the fall of 2002. My good friend and I were still pretty chummy and I ate lunch with his group of friends for the first week or so. With good intentions (in middle-school sense) he told me that I was not to get all problems correct on a math test or homework, because that’s not cool. I was told to deliberately work every tenth problem or so wrong to this effect.
I decided not to follow this piece of advice. If I wanted a good circle of friends, they first would not fall for gimmicks that make me supposedly look cool. If they did, then they could be considered shallow, at least in part. Because of this decision, I worked hard throughout middle school. So much that I kept a full load of honors courses with a workload to match. In eighth grade, I found myself in honors science, a relatively hard class with a good teacher.
Back in the day we would get assigned seats, of course, and for one rotation I sat next to this kid who needed a bit of help. The bit turned into a lot of help, for which I was perfectly glad to assist, for we had become pretty good friends.
The next seating rotation, we did not sit next to each other any more. That was it for our friendship. I saw him outside of class one day and said hi to him, for which he ignored me in the presence of his cool friends and pretended not to know me.
Because I have chosen not to name this individual, I’ll finish out why I mentioned him. So seeing how he had befriended me for the help, I judged him as being dim-witted and in need of plenty of help. Two incidents thereafter solidified this opinion.
The first was at a dry Christmas party senior year of high school. All the party people, including myself, were seated outside in comical conversation circles. Within our own circles we were conversing with each other.
Now many of my good friends are female, so my conversation circle was pretty much girls plus me and this other guy. In an adjacent circle was a group of football and baseball jocks. With most all sports being segregated by sex, their conversation circle was comprised only of guys, if memory serves me right. In that group was the aforementioned science class “friend,” if you will. Now a star football player, he received a scholarship to (the) Cornell University in New York.
The group began poking fun at me behind my back. I don’t remember the exact dialogue, but it was nasty and I do not care to elaborate for sake of word choice, if you catch my drift. They persisted and then moved on to the other guy in my conversation circle, another friend of mine. He wasn’t so good at hiding that he was hearing the entire insult and controlled himself to stay seated in his chair.
What transpired between the aggressors and the aggressees is irrelevant, so I’ll let you speculate as to the outcome.
The second incident regarding this individual did not happen but half a year ago. By this time, he was in attendance at Cornell and knowing fully well that he was, as my dad likes to call people, an idiot, I was curious as to how he was faring.
It just so happens that I’m friends with his ex-girlfriend, who also attends UCSD. Knowing that they’d broken up because of his infidelity, I asked how he’s doing at Cornell. She said that he feels really stupid there, to which I was not surprised and suddenly finding trouble containing my running laughter.
My second was in high school.
Many of my old friends may sense what’s to come in this second major decision. They would always remark to me stuff like: “You’re so busy!” “I never see you outside of class,” or “Do you have any free time?”
At the end of eighth grade we were led through registration of classes for freshman year of high school—the upcoming year. I talked to a counselor there. She said that if I wanted to get into Stanford, I would have to work extra hard and find a passion that you revolve around. I did both, definitely, but what pushed my chances of getting over the edge to the other side of the curve was a little thing I like to call community service.
My parents used to tell me that I’m really spoiled. When they would utter it, I would hate it. Now, I would say that was somewhat true. While I did not receive everything I wanted, I received everything I needed plus more. I never received stuff like big screen TVs or video game consoles for free, as did many of my classmates, but I never had to fight for food or had to find shelter like so many 40 miles southeast of Thousand Oaks. I was not given a car when I turned 16 (or ever for that matter) but I was given near unlimited access of my parents’. Being a teenage male, my driver’s insurance rates were sky high, but my parents never asked me to get a job to help pay for it.
So I took a look at the world, so to speak. Knowing full well what many of the underprivileged do with their lives—starting on a low note and ending on a high—I should be expected to end on an even higher note, having started from a relatively high note to begin with.
From this basis, I changed in two ways. One is ongoing and the other has already pretty much happened.
The first is that I became addicted to community service. I figured that I should use my ability and good health to assist others and those less fortunate. This is still going on as I try hard to find time perform my passion for service. I donate blood whenever I can (and so should you!) though I won’t be able to donate again until January 2011 due to my recent trip to Europe and my upcoming trip to Hong Kong.
The other is liberal (in the American sense) views (much to the covert dismay of my Republican father). No one person is inherently better than another in the same way that no one country is inherently better than another. In no way should making money be the primary goal for anyone’s life. Why should one person live with $10,000 drapes on every window in every room when someone not halfway across the globe works tirelessly every day for basic necessities? How can the United States call itself a Christian nation and claim to be accepting people of all faiths at the same time? Or for that matter how can the United States claim to be accepting and fail to insure every individual the same civil rights as the next?
While I claim a dislike for the Republican Party, I do not claim a dislike for its individual members, nor conservatism as an ideology.
I included this because as I am a political science major, I intend to write heavily about politics, political economy, and globalization from Hong Kong.
So by the time I was finishing high school I had been involved with at least six organizations. I did community service throughout Boy Scouts of America, including a 440-man-hour, $2,500-budget project for Eagle Scout rank; American Red Cross (of Ventura County), where I was involved as Youth Services Chair on the Board of Directors and Westlake High School Club President; National Honor Society, which does service with a variety of local organizations; Ambassadors Club, for service to the school; Los Robles Hospital, where I assisted the friendly pharmacist with inventory and paperwork; and Thousand Oaks Youth Commission, which gave me an award.
Even though all this organizations dominated nearly every day after school, this alone did not cause me to not get the best of grades.
I had another addition—school. I know it sounds silly, but I had a thing for taking extra classes. Each and every year I took seven classes. Junior and senior years I took an additional class at Moorpark Community College. My final semester of senior I took two classes at Moorpark Community College for a grand total of 9 classes at during my final semester at Westlake High School.
At graduation I was not going to Stanford, I had a ton of community service hours (probably literally), I had a respectable GPA (though not respectable enough for the Ivys), and I was set to go to UCSD with a combined AP-community college transfer of 86 credits (4 shy of junior standing).
My third was in college.
I guess this last major decision was not so much of a decision as a justification. I had not gotten into Stanford or the Ivys. I came to Eleanor Roosevelt College at the University of California, San Diego, to make a name for myself with expectations and disappointments.
Now that I’ve spent my first year at UCSD people ask me how I like it. My response it always the same: my biggest problem with it is that too many people don’t think they belong there. Out of all the first-years I’ve talked to, I can only name a handful that say they want to and plan to graduate from UCSD. In fact, this past year I’ve had two roommates because my first transferred out after the first quarter.
The part that bothered me was that the reason they didn’t feel they belonged was because they felt they should have gotten into college elsewhere. I got plenty of Berekeleys and UCLAs as responses.
At first, I was poised to become one of the many who didn’t “belong.” But what good would that do? UCSD is a perfectly good school and actually turned out to offer a really good education in my interests.
As I’ve explained in previous posts my majors, I have been unable to find comparable programs at other universities; and at none have I been able to find a program as enriching as Making of the Modern World.
Which brings me to my next point. Students are lazy. Well, that’s not my point, but not only are students at UCSD feeling as if they don’t belong, my classmates feel like they’ve had an injustice done to them by being placed in Eleanor Roosevelt College.
Most of the hate for ERC (from those who hate) is directed at MMW. As I explained earlier, I really appreciate MMW. Most complain about its length. One spiteful Wikipedia author claimed that at six quarters, MMW is by far the longest core writing class of all of UCSD’s six colleges.
I dispute that claim. It is indeed the longest, but not by far. Revelle College has five quarters of Humanities (HUM), which appears to be a western cultures and literature course, and an additional quarter of American cultures, making their grand total six. Sixth College has three Culture, Art, and Technology (CAT) lower division classes plus a colloquium for a total of four. Marshall College has three quarters of Dimensions of Culture (DOC), which many Marshall students say is useless, and the administrators are considering adding a fourth. Warren College has two writing courses plus Ethics for a total of three. And Muir College has two writing courses plus American cultures for a total of three as well.
So where is this all going? Rarely in my actions and choices have I been overall lazy. The decision to study abroad was no exception. The mountain of paperwork, multiple applications, and the money, just to name a few things. So why do it? I guess ironically going away to another university for a while would enhance the quality of my education at UCSD.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
First Post, Background
So this is my first post to this blog. I've never blogged before, so my style may seem odd to those of you seasoned bloggers. Yes, I know, it's not August quite yet, but I figured I wanted to record all of my thoughts before, during, and possibly after my experience.
Though a minority of undergraduates study abroad, doing so seems to be something of a common college experience, soon to be my own. I am told that out of the University of California campuses, San Diego (UCSD) leads in students studying abroad in any manner, and out of the six colleges at UCSD, Eleanor Roosevelt College (ERC) has by far the most students studying abroad. I happen to belong to both, so in short, I am in good company.
Currently, I am a first-year student, which will me a second-year when I study abroad next fall. It is my understanding that many students study abroad junior year, but I have decided to do it this fall because I plan to graduate early—three to five quarters to be exact, making me part of the Class of 2010 or the Class of 2011, though more likely the latter. This means that right now I have junior standing and will have senior standing after the end of this school year. Yeah, I took a lot of Advance Placement tests and plenty of community college classes in and during high school to get to where I am, and now there’s little doubt that it shows in my current standing.
Unlike many of my classmates, only a handful of whom I know fully intend on staying till graduation, I quite openly like UCSD, and I love ERC because of its international focus. ERC was my first college of choice when I applied to UCSD, and now I am honored to be studying here as part of its 20th entering class. Unlike many of my fellow students, I take great interest in the Making of the Modern World program (MMW), and am confident that the vast majority of ERC students do come out of the six-quarter sequence more knowledgeable about the world. When they graduate, I’m sure they will feel that the experience contributed to their education in a way that other general education requirements, even those at the other colleges at UCSD, do not. I originally entered college with the plan to complete a double major in Linguistics (Spec. in Language in Society) and International Studies-Political Science, but because of my interest in MMW (especially in quarters 2 and 3) I have recently found the desire to pick up a minor in the Study of Religion.
In studying abroad, I chose Hong Kong with my International Studies major in mind. The International Studies curriculum is interdisciplinary, with students having to choose a primary track (for me Political Science) and a secondary track (Anthropology). With my main focus being in Political Science, I was hoping to learn more about the "one country, two governments" system in place since the British handover in 1997. As I need an area of regional specialization for ERC as well as for my International Studies major, I have chosen (East) Asia to reflect this. For one of my classes, I wrote a four thousand, five hundred-word paper on the bilingual/trilingual language situation in public and private life in Hong Kong. In addition, Hong Kong forms a complicated and unique part of my heritage. While my father is a natural-born American from Detroit, Michigan, my mother is originally from Hong Kong, and immigrated to the United States when she was 11. The history of my mother's side of the family is directly influenced by Chinese politics and history, because her parents were both from well-off families in Hangzhou, near Shanghai. They fled south when the communists came to power, first going to nationalist-controlled Taiwan, then to what was then the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. My father’s parents are from rural Guangdong Province (what was long called Canton) yet he himself has never set foot outside North America. This, in combination with the fact that my mother immigrated at such a young age means that my exposure to any variety of Chinese has been minimal at very best. I am truly a third-generation American.
So to make myself clear, I do not speak Chinese.
Well, I speak broken conversational Mandarin and, to a lesser extent, Cantonese, but the fact of the matter is that my household was English-only and I learned my first Mandarin word around the age of 4 and never realized that other languages don’t necessarily follow English grammar until I was probably around 10. Still I can barely read and less can I hold a mildly sophisticated conversation. My second and third languages are Spanish and French, which I speak with relative fluency. This fact, while astonishing to some, should constantly be considered in my posts here on out. I will need time to adjust to Chinese customs and more time to gain moderate fluency in Cantonese and or Mandarin. Because of this disconnect, I comfortably refer to myself as first and foremost American.
I chose the University of Hong Kong (HKU) because it has a rich history and prestigious rankings. It is above the University of California schools worldwide and is known as being one of the top five universities in Greater Asia. Founded by the British in 1911, it has a traditional coat of arms, and like most universities in Hong Kong, teaches nearly all its classes in English (I'm assuming for now the British Received Pronunciation standard). In this sense, I do not need to worry too much about language barriers, at least within the university. The two other universities that UC sends students to are the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (of which my uncle was founding president and at which my cousin currently teaches and researches). HKU is the hardest to get into of the three, both in general and on exchange, with just eight spots for the twenty-five-plus UCSD that applied for this coming fall. I am fortunate to be going there.
In the coming weeks before my departure, I plan to write more about my application process and the current thoughts going around my head because I have a lot to say. If you've read this far into my initial post, I congratulate you and thank you, and hope that you’ll keep reading. In attempting to find an appropriate end to this initial post, what comes to mind now is a phrase used for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing:
北京欢迎您。(Beijing welcomes you.)
Or in my case,
香港欢迎我，(Hong Kong welcomes me,)
hopefully.
*
Though a minority of undergraduates study abroad, doing so seems to be something of a common college experience, soon to be my own. I am told that out of the University of California campuses, San Diego (UCSD) leads in students studying abroad in any manner, and out of the six colleges at UCSD, Eleanor Roosevelt College (ERC) has by far the most students studying abroad. I happen to belong to both, so in short, I am in good company.
Currently, I am a first-year student, which will me a second-year when I study abroad next fall. It is my understanding that many students study abroad junior year, but I have decided to do it this fall because I plan to graduate early—three to five quarters to be exact, making me part of the Class of 2010 or the Class of 2011, though more likely the latter. This means that right now I have junior standing and will have senior standing after the end of this school year. Yeah, I took a lot of Advance Placement tests and plenty of community college classes in and during high school to get to where I am, and now there’s little doubt that it shows in my current standing.
Unlike many of my classmates, only a handful of whom I know fully intend on staying till graduation, I quite openly like UCSD, and I love ERC because of its international focus. ERC was my first college of choice when I applied to UCSD, and now I am honored to be studying here as part of its 20th entering class. Unlike many of my fellow students, I take great interest in the Making of the Modern World program (MMW), and am confident that the vast majority of ERC students do come out of the six-quarter sequence more knowledgeable about the world. When they graduate, I’m sure they will feel that the experience contributed to their education in a way that other general education requirements, even those at the other colleges at UCSD, do not. I originally entered college with the plan to complete a double major in Linguistics (Spec. in Language in Society) and International Studies-Political Science, but because of my interest in MMW (especially in quarters 2 and 3) I have recently found the desire to pick up a minor in the Study of Religion.
In studying abroad, I chose Hong Kong with my International Studies major in mind. The International Studies curriculum is interdisciplinary, with students having to choose a primary track (for me Political Science) and a secondary track (Anthropology). With my main focus being in Political Science, I was hoping to learn more about the "one country, two governments" system in place since the British handover in 1997. As I need an area of regional specialization for ERC as well as for my International Studies major, I have chosen (East) Asia to reflect this. For one of my classes, I wrote a four thousand, five hundred-word paper on the bilingual/trilingual language situation in public and private life in Hong Kong. In addition, Hong Kong forms a complicated and unique part of my heritage. While my father is a natural-born American from Detroit, Michigan, my mother is originally from Hong Kong, and immigrated to the United States when she was 11. The history of my mother's side of the family is directly influenced by Chinese politics and history, because her parents were both from well-off families in Hangzhou, near Shanghai. They fled south when the communists came to power, first going to nationalist-controlled Taiwan, then to what was then the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. My father’s parents are from rural Guangdong Province (what was long called Canton) yet he himself has never set foot outside North America. This, in combination with the fact that my mother immigrated at such a young age means that my exposure to any variety of Chinese has been minimal at very best. I am truly a third-generation American.
So to make myself clear, I do not speak Chinese.
Well, I speak broken conversational Mandarin and, to a lesser extent, Cantonese, but the fact of the matter is that my household was English-only and I learned my first Mandarin word around the age of 4 and never realized that other languages don’t necessarily follow English grammar until I was probably around 10. Still I can barely read and less can I hold a mildly sophisticated conversation. My second and third languages are Spanish and French, which I speak with relative fluency. This fact, while astonishing to some, should constantly be considered in my posts here on out. I will need time to adjust to Chinese customs and more time to gain moderate fluency in Cantonese and or Mandarin. Because of this disconnect, I comfortably refer to myself as first and foremost American.
I chose the University of Hong Kong (HKU) because it has a rich history and prestigious rankings. It is above the University of California schools worldwide and is known as being one of the top five universities in Greater Asia. Founded by the British in 1911, it has a traditional coat of arms, and like most universities in Hong Kong, teaches nearly all its classes in English (I'm assuming for now the British Received Pronunciation standard). In this sense, I do not need to worry too much about language barriers, at least within the university. The two other universities that UC sends students to are the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (of which my uncle was founding president and at which my cousin currently teaches and researches). HKU is the hardest to get into of the three, both in general and on exchange, with just eight spots for the twenty-five-plus UCSD that applied for this coming fall. I am fortunate to be going there.
In the coming weeks before my departure, I plan to write more about my application process and the current thoughts going around my head because I have a lot to say. If you've read this far into my initial post, I congratulate you and thank you, and hope that you’ll keep reading. In attempting to find an appropriate end to this initial post, what comes to mind now is a phrase used for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing:
北京欢迎您。(Beijing welcomes you.)
Or in my case,
香港欢迎我，(Hong Kong welcomes me,)
hopefully.
*
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