In retrospect

I remember crying on the night of December 12, 2012.

It was around 6 p.m. and I had just read the first line of my acceptance letter from Duke. I suppose it is embarrassing to admit and seems a bit overdramatic, but it's the truth. Even today, two years later, I still get goose bumps just thinking about that night. Everything is so vivid—the tears of joy, the jubilant atmosphere at home that followed and the sheer excitement I had in imagining what the next four years had to bring.

Though it sounds cliché, I’ll say it anyway—college has changed me. My sleep schedule is undeniably absurd, I have an unhealthy obsession with dirty chai lattes and I have found myself saying, “On food points, please,” as I hand the cashier my ID card at eateries not on campus—Fun and disappointing fact: not even the Cook-out on Hillsborough will take food points or FLEX. Yet, if you were to take a picture of my high school senior self and compare it to a picture of me today, they wouldn’t look all that different. Minus the changes in hairstyle, the muscle mass is still relatively lacking and though I hate to admit it, I think I am just about done growing. But looking back, a more profound self-awareness is one of the many significant developments that I have gained thus far. Though this is not physically apparent, it is nonetheless a critical measure of change.

Don’t worry. This is not about to become some sappy article about discovering a brand new identity in college after leaving home. Really, it isn’t. Rather, I believe that for me, my few semesters at Duke have shed a new light on my already existing understanding and perception of self.

Last fall, I wrote a paper on how being Asian American affected my education. The topic had been something that had interested me for a while and the transition into Duke and its new cultural atmosphere inevitably nudged me to finally pursue it. Though I was only about half a semester in, a small portion of my paper was dedicated to comparing my experiences as an Asian American student back home to those I’ve had here on campus. It exposed me to previously unconsidered ways my race and culture may have influenced my life both in and outside of the classroom. Though the topic of race is often tabooed and uncomfortable, the project was immensely rewarding—it pushed me to delve beyond my academic comfort zone and forced me to be brutally honest about my life.

Back home, my town has a substantially large Asian population, so growing up, I was never really conscious of my position as a racial minority. I certainly never felt judged or ostracized for my Korean heritage. When I first arrived at Duke, the student body’s racial demographics were quite the culture shock. Frankly, the immersion into the new community was both exciting and intimidating. Clear of the first few days of orientation week, however, I got used to the change. Ethnicity had never been a discerning factor in the past for any means and I certainly had no reason to expect otherwise.

However, during my first break back home, a friend pointed out to me that based on the Facebook photos of me at Duke, it seemed like I had no Asian friends at all. My friend joked about how drastically different that was compared to my high school career, where the bulk of my close friends were, in fact, Asian. Though this was by no means true, as one of my closest friends here is Korean, my friend’s remark pushed me to reexamine the influence of my race on my day-to-day life at Duke.