I owe my mother my life. She first came to the United States in 1989, as a master’s student in sociology at University of Illinois at Chicago. My sister, who was four at the time, and my father followed a few months later. Without this transatlantic migration, I would not be here, due to the one-child policy in China at the time. Over the next nine years, my father would start as a bus boy and end as a computer hardware entrepreneur, selling out at weekend PC shows due to his low prices and generous customer service, even with the language barrier. My mother would graduate from her master’s program while working as a teacher’s assistant and go on to be a data analyst at United Healthcare. Together, my parents began in a small apartment in Chicago, living on $300 a month, all while taking care of my toddler sister to moving into a suburban home located in a nice neighborhood and conceiving me. This is just one paragraph out of the book of sacrifices my parents underwent. This is the story that steels me when I am weak. This is my backbone. Combined with my family’s history, my childhood is another source I draw upon for resilience in fighting against social injustices and racism. Growing up first-generation was hard—to live in a successful school district meant living in gentrified areas of little diversity. Being aware of my “other”ness came early. I remember the isolation I felt during lunchtime in elementary school, when my table-mates would make fun of the smell and appearance of the traditional Chinese food my mother had lovingly packed at 6 am before she left for work. Whether it was soup, dumplings, moon cakes, all would spike disgusted curiosity from classmates and shame from me. Even if it meant settling for a tasteless PB&J, Kudos bar, and Goldfish, all I wanted was to be normal. This desire to fit in at the cost of silencing my culture would follow me to high school. After years of an internal tightrope walk between my household Chinese culture and the stifling American one, I emerged as an advocate for my heritage and all others at risk of extinguishment by whiteness. As a first-generation, educated woman of color in STEM, I feel that it is my responsibility to create spaces for other women of color to be welcomed into and succeed in. It is for my parents that I run so fervently in my pursuit. Another struggle that has shaped me is my mental health. My mental health is two-edged blade. It gives me resilience and takes it away. I was diagnosed with depression my junior year of high school, and I did the whole shebang. I went to therapy, went on antidepressants, the works. I thought I had sufficient coping skills when it came time for college, but my first year was one of the hardest I’ve ever experienced. It is in college that I’ve had the lowest of lows and most rewarding of highs. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my stability before coming to college came from the security of my home, family, and friends. Once all those support systems were abruptly 1,800 miles away from me, I had only myself. After a particularly rough night, I checked into outpatient therapy for the last few weeks of spring quarter during my first year, while still continuing my studies. Through this program, I overcame many triggers and found value in journaling and meditation, which are coping mechanisms I still fall back on in times of need. Most importantly, I found value in myself and my work. My self-love is still not quite as solid as I’d like, but I’m only human. I will always have growing pains. No matter how hard it gets, I am not ashamed of my diagnosis. Although it can be my worst enemy at times, I am grateful for the deep introspection that comes with depression. The sensitivity to internal conflicts and suffering around me invokes a relentless passion to help however many people I can in whatever capacity. It is why I chose civil engineering and why I applied to the Global Social Benefit Fellowship: Both have potential to redistribute power and redeliver autonomy to those who have been forcibly deprived of it through colonialism. With all this in mind, my travels abroad to Costa Rica have largely influenced the path I’m traveling. Shortly after my depression diagnosis, I went to Costa Rica during the summer after junior year of high school through Rustic Pathways, a travel and volunteer organization. The first nine days, I partook in various community service projects, such as paving roads to remote villages and painting houses. The latter nine days, I stayed with the indigenous BriBri community to help build a chocolate factory. A source of their income was farming, collecting, and roasting cacao beans, which is a highly labor-intensive process. Since the community had no access to a machine to produce their own chocolate, they sold large bags of cacao for a mere five dollars to a middleman, who then made a large profit by selling the beans to Hershey’s. Rustic Pathway’s goal over the summer was to construct a local chocolate-making machine so the BriBri tribe could sell products straight to consumers, increase their income, and directly partake in the market. In this work, I felt pure contentment and fulfillment for the first time in my life. I have been chasing after this feeling ever since. Four years later, I traveled again. From July to November 2018, I studied abroad in Auckland, New Zealand. While my visit to Costa Rica created a direction for me to follow, my time in New Zealand modified it. Taking a quarter away from SCU while deep into my studies provided me freedom to question my vocational choice of civil engineering. Because I was thrown into large lecture halls filled with students already familiar with each other, I suddenly had no friends in the classroom to study with. Not yet assimilated to large lecture halls and lack of support from my peers, I began to struggle in my courses and question my major. Do I enjoy civil engineering in itself? Or, is my interest in it transient and only because of my friends and faculty at SCU? What am I going to do if I find out it’s the latter? It’s too late to switch majors. I’m stuck. These uncertainties only grew, and in their crescendo, I realized that I had so passively been following this predefined path to ensured “success.” I was plodding through the check list of receiving good grades, obtaining an internship, and was planning on pursuing graduate school or securing a technical job upon my return to the US. Going to New Zealand disrupted this trajectory, and the resulting questions are what led me to this limbo of re-examining my vocation. Since New Zealand is in the Southern Hemisphere, I came home mid-November. This left me with almost two full months of winter break, giving me a wealth of time for reflection. After late nights of journaling and processing with friends and family, I realized I had internalized three thoughts during my time abroad:
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