Wisdom at Age 22

A few months ago, I was asked a question along the lines of, "What has been your favorite age?" My response was something like, "The age I'm at right now, because I'm always getting wiser."

Sure, I'll admit there's a bit of romanticism about the "milestone" years, but looking back I wouldn't mind smacking my former selves a bit.

I would tell my 16-year-old self to get to know my favorite high school teachers better and to be friendlier with everyone in general, even if I have no real interest in being BFFs with them or if I secretly think they're immature/vapid/incompetent/dumb-as-bricks.

I would tell my 18-year-old self to stop measuring my self-worth with my GPA and learn how to study smarter, not harder.

I would tell my 21-year-old self not to take the people around me for granted and learn how to show affection every once in awhile.

Why did I think of this recently? I had a phone call with my mother yesterday, and at one point in the conversation, she told me she ran into A's mother at the farmer's market on Saturday. Like all Asian mothers are wont to do, they started tittering about what their children were up to these days. My mom told her that I was likely heading to New Orleans for med school in the fall. Well, A's mother reacted in dismay in light of this news (aiyah!), and she said something about how her darling A had been disappointed about going to Northwestern for medical school.

Hello shit, meet fan.

My response to that was less than artful. It probably sounded really defensive, actually. But the gist of it was something like, considering how effectively my sense of entitlement had been squashed at Duke, all I was really hoping for was just getting into ANY school. Nevermind UCSF or JHU or whatnot.

A and I were both among the twelve high school valedictorians in our graduating class who'd maintained a 4.0 GPA all four years, so I guess you could say we started off at the same level, until A chose Berkeley over Penn for undergrad and I chose Duke over Berkeley. I will fully admit that part of my decision in choosing Duke at the time was out of pride. Quite a number of people at my high school end up at Berkeley each year, while usually only one or two people get into Duke. And, seeing as I was used to being at the top of my class back then, I wanted to be "that one girl that went to Duke" as opposed to "one of the twenty that went to Berkeley."

Stuck-up mentality, perhaps? Well, I don't regret choosing Duke one bit. Sure, I was chewed up and spit out during those four years, but for all the ups and downs, it made me who I am today. There's also something to be said about going to a school with so much school spirit. My high school had zero school pride, because our cliques rarely wanted anything to do with each other. The thing about Duke is, because it gets shitted on so much by everyone else (dook, puke, I've heard it all), we tend to band together in an us-versus-them mentality. Also, having a consistently great basketball team to root for is always fun. (side note: Jabari Parker might be my favorite Duke player ever, since I started following the team in 2009)

//end Sophelia's Ode to Duke

But back on topic. Maybe A did exceptionally well at Berkeley and had the stats to get into NW Med. Maybe I would have had a better GPA if I'd chosen to attend a different undergrad school But it's moot to think like this because there's no point in dwelling on the what-could-have-beens.

One piece of wisdom I adopted during my time at Duke is to accept that everything happens the way it's meant to be. You try your best whenever you have the agency to do so, but accept the outcome whatever it happens to be. I've come to believe that the universe will throw obstacles in your path in order to nudge you towards the direction you're meant to take.

It took me a long time to accept this. I spent several years believing I was a big fat disappointment. I was rejected from the five other private undergraduate universities I applied for, including the prestigious HYPS. My parents' disappointment was quite palpable; in fact, my mother even told me so. It was still a sore spot for me three years later, when my younger brother managed to achieve everything I'd failed to do: place as a finalist on the first try at the piano competition I'd competed in twice and only placed as semifinalist each time; earn a perfect score on the SAT; gain all those research internships I'd only half-heartedly tried to get and was rejected from; receive acceptance letters from every school he applied to except good ole Yale.

Not gonna lie. At times, it was a hard pill to swallow, watching your only sibling achieve everything your parents had piled their hopes on you at one point. But by then, I was already in my junior year of college, and I'd come to realize that while all those expectations they'd placed on me had been appropriate for my brother, but they hadn't been right for me. I never wanted to be a scientific researcher. I didn't love science the way I loved English. (This became exceptionally clear when I found myself reading critical essays on English literature via JSTOR for fun. Would I ever look up scientific papers for fun? Not likely.) Duke ended up being the right place for me, in that I was able to earn a second major in English without running through major hoops (a near-impossible feat to do at a place like Harvard).

And just to clarify, I am proud of my brother. I will brag about my sibling to anybody whenever I have the chance.

Time will tell, but I'm optimistic that New Orleans will be a good place for me. There's so much culture and artistic history in the city, and there's a huge emphasis on service at the school I've been accepted to. Moreover, I'm not pursuing a medical degree in hopes of becoming the top researcher in the world. I want a career that will allow me to interact with people, to observe life at the crossroads of human mortality like Chekhov and William Carlos Williams. I was so unhappy through the tail-end of my teenage years because I let other people dictate what my ambitions were. Now that I know what I want for myself, I shouldn't let people like A's mother get me down, right?

Apparently, I still need to learn how to grow a thicker skin. But I'm getting there.