I keep putting off writing a college reflections post for the same reason Carl Fredricksen is unwilling to let go of his house and his memories of Ellie. In much the same way, I’m reluctant to write these last few pages of a college chapter for fear of facing new blank pages—a tabula rasa; yet I know I need to reflect deeply on these last few years that have been life-changing catalysts and milestones before I can experience a sense of closure and move on confidently.
How can I put into words how these last three years have radically changed and shaped me into who I am today? I can’t. I can only briefly touch upon a few accomplishments and failures, firsts and lasts, new friendships and missed connections—yet I can’t portray the experiential qualities of these moments and revisit them with the same awe I once possessed.
Freshman year, I lived in a ten-by-ten box with two other girls on the eighth floor of Ehrman Hall. My floormates dubbed us the Penthouse, thanks to our frequent visitors awesome view of the sunset behind the Bay. We had co-ed bathrooms, as in, I’d be showering in a stall next to a guy, and we’d chat casually. The first week, I thought I was going to get mugged or contract a deadly disease from “HIV park” or get arrested for inhaling too much second-hand weed. By the second week, I was walking around downtown alone at night just fine.
The first day of my first environmental design class, I wrote in my old blog, “When another GSI told us that the lectures would run 45 minutes longer than listed on our schedule, I was actually celebrating inside of my heart rather than moping about longer class periods. When the head professor was explaining our first project, I got the tingling sensation that I usually get when I go pee after I swim in cold water…because I was so excited.” Little did I know about the frequent all-nighters and minor casualties that were to come, and little did I give heed to practically—my first crappy foamcore model was of my dream house in the shape of an “S”.
On my eighteenth birthday, I wrote with much poetic license:
Seventeen and savage.
I can’t break through.
Like a powerful dancer tumbling in my head—locked in.
Like a sprinter dashing away—bound with a cord attached to my heart.
Seventeen and three hundred sixty-four days.
I shoved myself through the one-way door.
Like an angry bull charging forward—confused by the empty ring.
Like a bold captain sailing out to sea—worried sick without his compass.
Eighteen and anxious.
I can’t return.
Like a child running back with outreaching arms towards her mother—unwelcome with crossed arms.
Like a baby’s wide, pleading eyes asking for some reassurance—met with a glance diverged.
Eighteen.
I don’t feel eighteen.
Eight, maybe.
I can’t say I feel much different despite finally turning twenty-one come September.
That first semester, I also built a life-sized black-faced spoonbill out of water bottles which won First Place, joined AIAS and ran for Freshman Representative, threw up three times after an impossibly hard physics midterm (and then rocked that final), raised walls at a Habitat for Humanity site in Oakland for seven hours straight, participated in my first Berkeley Project and painted the exterior of the Berkeley Free Clinic…even cut and gelled my own fauxhawk for a week before I let it flop.
Second semester, I was already having qualms about my major. January 23, 2007, I blogged, “I want to switch majors now because I can’t take the pressure/work load anymore, but there’s nothing else that I want to switch to, so I guess I’m just going to stick with it and figure out what to do with my immune system. Right now, my throat feels like I keep swallowing balls of flames. Yesterday, we had ten drawings due, tomorrow I have five more due, which were just assigned yesterday along with the reading and homework.” And that was only my first studio. My blog entries soon became repetitive variations of, “I went into studio at 4:30pm last night and came out at 7:45am this morning. I spent 20min max grabbing dinner to go, and 10min max grabbing coffee… and then I spent the rest of the 14 hours and 45 min drawing, inhaling charcoal dust, and preventing myself from breaking down.”
March 1, 2007, I documented my new personal record:
“21st: pulled an all nighter.
22nd: passed out.
23rd: pulled an all nighter.
24th: pulled an all nighter.
25th: pulled an all nighter.
26th: completely passed out.
27th: pulled an all nighter.
28th: pulled an all nighter.”
I’ve beaten that PR every subsequent semester and developed a rather resilient circadian cycle.
Aside from bitchin’ and moaning in studio second semester, I also ran for Internal Vice President for AIAS—and won, attended San Francisco’s annual Valentine’s Day pillow fight and ingested laced cupcakes, went to New Orleans with Habitat for Humanity and slept in a triple bunk every night for a week—and nearly fell through a poorly shingled roof once, drew a 6’ self-portrait within one night, fell off my loft bed and popped a few bones in my neck, spine and hip, fundraised and participated in Dance Marathon—and nearly fainted by sunrise, and left for Japan and Taiwan that summer with my roommate, Vicki. I came back a month later for summer school and moved into an apartment two blocks away from campus.
Sophomore year, I experienced my first studio breakdown—a result of taking four architecture classes simultaneously, was published in the Cal Literary Arts Magazine for the third semester in a row, skipped school to go to London, Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam with my mom, spent winter break in Taiwan practicing Chinese calligraphy with my right hand despite being severely left-handed, built a wooden guitar case that transformed into a rocking chair, broke thirteen drill bits while constructing a steel privacy pod, listened to Steven Holl present his current projects in our own tiny auditorium, escaped to Napa with a few construction classmates and GSIs and tried to get up close and personal with the private Herzog & DeMeuron winery, partied it up in Sacramento for the West Quad Conference, ran for AIAS President and won again, listened to Steve Wozniak speak live in Haas, and then took four classes over the summer thinking I was going to double-major in architecture and business. I did, however, manage to skip a few days of class to go to Washington D.C. for the Grassroots Leadership Conference, and I did escape to Yunnan, China at the end of summer for a well-deserved vacation.
Fall semester of my junior year was my only break from studio and the only time I ever spent more hours wandering around campus than in Wurster. I took six classes, five of which were upper divs, none of which were related to architecture—and yet I had more sleep that semester than my final semester, which only consisted of one studio course. Junior year was my last year in college and astoundingly life-transforming as I experienced various conferences that sparked new interests and opened up new gateways into alternative careers paths (divergent from architecture).
September, I was able to volunteer at TechCrunch50 via connections, and that conference alone spurred my interest in tech and social media. October, Teresa and I started the humor blogs, My Mom is a Fob and My Dad is a Fob purely for fun. We never dreamed of being featured on prominent blogs such as Neatorama and Margaret Cho’s personal blog—let alone going on a Seattle radio talk show or having a spotlight interview on TaiwaneseAmerican.org. Through the experience, we’ve learned how to market ourselves from first-hand trial-and-error experiences and deal with negative feedback positively, and now we have a book deal with Penguin’s Perigee Books thanks to our agent from Writer’s House.
November—Thanksgiving break, my mom, sister and I were nearly stuck in Phuket, Thailand thanks to airport bombings and protests. Somehow, we managed to escape via a God-sent Firefly and transcended new levels while sleeping on airport benches. December, I realized I had such an unenjoyable semester taking business classes that I marched straight to Sproul after my last final and filled out the graduation form for Spring 2009 with [what I thought was] sound reasoning. At the end of the month, I left for the annual AIAS National Forum in Denver and listened to keynote speakers such as Paul Polak who was inspirational but not even half as cool as Michel Rojkind, who received a standing ovation from us on New Year’s for dropping jaws and empowering a young crowd of aspiring architects.
January, Teresa and I both attended the last MacWorld Expo with Apple as well as the Crunchies 2008 Awards, and that night, I made up my mind that I wanted to stay in Silicon Valley forever. I also read and watched all the reviews about products demo’d at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas that week, which strengthened my belief that product design was the perfect fusion of my passions: tech, gadgets, social media and design. The start of the new semester, I resigned as Co-President of AIAS and stepped up as Co-Director of Berkeley Innovation. My networks soon consisted of more entrepreneurs and media geeks than aspiring architects, and I began to research more product design firms than arch studios.
Despite a major shift in career interests, I poured my heart and soul into my last architecture studio and reinvigorated my passion for architecture. For the first time, I felt like I was beginning to understand something I once thought relied heavily on aesthetics and written justifications only. I also had a surprisingly harsh but charismatic and genuinely caring studio instructor who I learned to respect deeply as the semester went on. I hardly saw the light of day and sat glued to my studio desk for hours on end, fully immersed in my work with a passionate intensity I’ve never experienced before.
Then April came, and ITASA yanked me out of studio and into a car on a drive down to LA for the West Coast Conference at USC, followed two weeks later by the Midwest Conference held at UIUC. I had an extremely difficult time catching up with studio work and nearly pinned myself up on my professor’s Wall of Shame, but the two conferences were unimaginably empowering, eye-opening and inspiring—and well worth every missed day of school. I befriended an eclectic group of talented artists and felt support from a tight-knit community to pursue my creative/artistic ambitions bravely—a gargantuan feat when I’ve lived in Silicon Valley my entire life, influenced daily by practical and successful friends. I’ve already been invited to speak at the East Coast Conference at MIT next February, and I’m collaborating with Jason, founder of TurlistMedia.com this time.
May, I “graduated” on a solid note, in the sense that I finished all of my academic requirements with twenty-too-many units, but I never went to “my” graduation, walked across a stage or shook hands with faculty. Instead, I escaped to San Francisco that day with a few friends from the Midwest, to which a family friend responded with, “That’s very SerenaStyle!” My atypical Asian parents who never cared about my academic well-being also had no doubt that I wouldn’t graduate college, so attending a symbolic ceremony for the class of ’09 held no meaning for me especially when I identify with the class of ’10 and will receive my diploma in the mail. Knowing that my dad was proud of me for somehow “beating” the system, completing an architecture program within three years and saving him a significant amount of money was rewarding enough—although deep inside, I wanted to stay in school forever for the academic rigor, intellectual stimulation and excuse to avoid harsh economic realities and struggling job markets.
My uncle called to congratulate me, and the first question he asked was, “Are you lost?” I instinctively replied with a “huh?” despite knowing full well what he meant, so he repeated himself, “Are you lost?” My mom had warned me that I would feel “lost” after college with no visible promises and jobs lined up ahead of me, yet my only response to such advice is, “Been there, done that.” I’ve felt lost pursuing an art at a research institute rather than an art school. I’ve felt lost being an Asian minority studying something other than engineering, medicine, business or law—despite my academic competence. I’ve felt lost living in Silicon Valley my entire life yet not having engineers for parents; and I’m still at a loss as to why I have such passionate interests for fields that are struggling despite being secretly ambitious and practical-minded—most of the time.
Objectively speaking, print is dying, and I’ve already faced its repercussions when I worked as a layout designer for Mochi Magazine last summer, only to resign when I found out none of my layouts would be printed as the magazine decided to switch to an online blog format. Despite that minor set back, I still worked as a graphic/cover designer for California Engineer this past school year purely for fun, and I’ve been (and still am) the album designer for HyStudio Photography these past two years. I love graphic and layout design and online media will never be the same as printed media, but I still occasionally fantasize about working for a design publication as a layout editor (a tiny dream reminiscent of the high school journalism days)—yet print is dying.
And of course, we’re still in a deep recession set-off by a housing bubble burst, we’re experiencing the lowest construction rate in sixteen years, and yet I still want to be an architect. Well yes, I want to be a product designer even more—but I still want to be an architect. No one was hiring at the CED job fair and none of my classmates can find an architecture internship—but I’m still impractically optimistic for no justifiable reason. Give me a few more years when I’m forced to come to my senses in order to survive, but for now, just let me dream. Choosing architecture as my major made no sense unit-to-hour-wise and I’ve wanted to jump out of the studio windows many, many times—but hey, I still loved it. I don’t have any experience working in an architecture firm, but I have worked at Habitat construction sites and I did also help the CSGSA redesign their graduate lounge in Soda Hall.
The only viable immediate career option I see for myself is to continue to be a web and graphic designer, which I don’t mind being in the short-term, but ultimately, I would like to wiggle my way into industrial design and eventually get into my dream graduate program and dream company (neither of which I will disclose) to fulfill my childhood dreams of becoming an inventor and bring together my four passions mentioned previously: tech, gadgets, social media and design. How I’m going to get there from where I am right now is still shrouded in mystery and a life-long pursuit I have yet to solve ambitiously and stubbornly. I have neither a promising, prescribed path that pre-med majors can trudge down in a straight trajectory nor the security and endless options that engineers are blessed with, but I do have one thing going for me, and that is knowing exactly what I want to do in life—and for that, I am not lost.
