by Debbie ChanA typical summer before college started consisted of me going to SAT preparation classes and just studying throughout the entire two thirds of my “summer vacation.” After these classes, I would have two to three weeks to myself; a kind of freedom that is short lived before the new school year started. This became a normal activity that I developed over the years. I started my freshman year going to summer classes because I was accustomed to always going to school in some way, shape, and form. I would travel with my family but, usually traveling was for educational purposes. Just recently over the winter break of 2017, we went to the middle of nowhere near Maryland and we went on an Amish tour and learned about ice sculpting and the history of Maryland. I made my sophomore year more lenient because I started to focus on both my major but more importantly finishing my premed prerequisites. I volunteered at a hospital and worked at different jobs for pocket money but, that soon ended. After the end of my fall semester of that following year, I found myself focusing on writing, taking pictures, and documenting everything around me. Everything came back to me in a full circle, all the things I enjoyed when I was in high school came back to me, and I found my passion and what I enjoyed doing the most. This led to a “self-crisis” because it forced me to start on a new slate to develop myself again. The typical road to becoming a doctor or any profession that includes a specific degree requires one to going to a graduate program. For medicine, after finishing an undergrad degree, I would then go to medical school followed by my residency and hopefully get into a fellowship program. It was after removing myself from this very organized plan, that I found myself lost. I didn’t know what to do. And so, for this summer, I made a goal to make it a summer where I will start enjoying my time by doing what I’ve always loved: learning, writing, taking pictures, and documenting the world around me. I began my summer working on both my photography and writing portfolio. In between, I looked for internships and job opportunities related to writing and photography or digital media, but those plans didn’t work out. I made plans on traveling and going to China for the whole month of June. The majority of the internships I looked into required me to start either at the beginning or the middle of June, which conflicted with my summer internship. During my one long month stay in China, I was on a social media cleanse and at first I didn’t mind not going on my social media apps, but soon the withdrawal symptoms hit me like a tsunami wave. I didn’t realize that I was consumed in the social media world and this was my life. I wasn’t able to contact my friends and simple things like not being able to share pictures of what I was doing made me feel anxious. While living in China it helped me gain back my consciousness of how to separate my personal life from my social media accounts. The constant pressures I gave myself subconsciously on wanting more likes or even planning when to upload pictures to gain more likes showed me the shallowness in my life. During my time in China, I socialized with locals and students from different college campuses and the interactions and conversations we had, aside from the environment, was a culture shock I didn’t think I would experience. Growing up as an Asian-American from a family who emigrated from China, there were some similarities, but even with the similarities, there were a lot of differences. I was born and raised in New York and I was always taught to be independent but the friends I’ve met from China view the family and themselves as a whole unit. I found myself whenever I ask questions that were self-related or self-reflected, they would answer with “Well, we think that” or “What we think is.” Another culture shock for me was that bicycles, mopeds, and motorcycles were everywhere. As old as New York is in equivalent to this city with its high density of human population, it surprised me that the best way to travel is to ride one of these vehicles. It’s like in New York, instead of using the MTA due to their consistent train delays or taking an Uber or taxi due to heavy traffic, walking is the most practical way of traveling.
This was the summer I started to have an actual taste of what “growing up,” learning, and having a sense of the world around me feels like. And I would not trade this for anything. If I didn’t go away for a month and just stayed in New York, I don’t think any of the “self-conflicted feelings” or “self–struggles” while I was in China would ever happen to me and so this is the summer where I am starting to finally live my life. To live a life where I can actually say that I am experiencing a once in a life time experience, brings me joy.
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