Monday, November 1, 2010

College Experiences.

I set out to do a favor for a researcher on campus. I had planned to do this for about two weeks now. The mission is incredible. Essentially, the researcher has noticed there is a scarcity of information on the Asian American college experience, while there seems to be a lot of interest in how Hispanics and African Americans fare. This inequality has made her seek out the college experience from Asian Americans, and when I heard of this opportunity to just pour my heart out and write about what I've been through in these past 4 years, I jumped. I knew I could be really passionate about what I've learned and my self-reflection.

It was Sunday night, or early Monday morning, and I knew I had to make the long drive back to my life in Houston that afternoon to make it to class on time at 4. So it was about 4am, and we had just finished watching nearly 3 hours of 'Equals 3', a YouTuber that made videos reviewing other popular viral videos. We laughed so much and I asked to hi-jack the computer so I could write my piece.

I was extremely exhausted, but I sat in the red metal folding chair, slouched over, writing on a netbook to get it done, 3 hours later, until it was done. I hardly changed positions because ... inspiration struck. The words flowed from my mind onto the screen.

I was sore. But the words just came to me. As I recounted certain encounters, I realized just how much I have been through, even though there were certain instances that I forgot to mention, that certainly were important.

I didn't edit the piece at all. No spell check. No grammar checks. No re-reading to add sentences where transitions were choppy. I copied the word document and sent it, verbatim, and then went to sleep promptly at 7am.

I woke up at around 12:30, from a call from Kyle, and then woke up. I left Sally's around 1:30 and got to campus right when TP2 started. It was an epic journey, that only happened because I focused on the outcome. I wanted an incident free trip, and I wanted to make it to class on time.

I got an email that evening from the researcher that said my input was amazing and that it was one of the few candid and honest accounts she had received thus far.

I knew I wanted to do my piece justice, and I think I did. I felt really cathartic after this weekend, but that really was an emotional process for me. This vulnerability has been a good wake up call.

It was 10 pages long, even with huge gaps in my college experience.

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