Part 1: New York, the first three years

The first time I went on an actual college visit was the first and only time I had been to the West Coast prior to my moving here. I went with my mother as a vacation to visit a cousin who happened to be living and working in California. This was the summer after 10th grade, and we visited three colleges.

The second time was the summer after 11th grade. I had, on a whim, narrowed down my college choice to three "top choices". One was because I used to have a strange thing for Jodie Foster when I was 13, and after reading her 1982 Equire article "Why Me?", I decided that I wanted to go to Yale. Then, there was something about a sleepy college town in New England with a tiny campus and unbearably liberal student body that attracted me, so then there was Wesleyan.

Then the third was in New York. I always felt that I wasn't built for cities -- it's noisy, smelly, and there are so many people. But whatever it was while I was there, I decided that what I needed at that point in life was not something that was easy, so I picked the most difficult place to be. Also being lazy and arrogant at age 17, I wasn't concerned about getting accepted and assumed that I'd get in with early decision without an issue.

I got in, and I went.

The first two years were an incredible feat of loneliness. The more I felt like I was pushing myself to participate, the more empty my social life felt. In the first week I was there, I decided to run for my residence hall's executive board (and won); by the end of my sophomore year, I had a regular part-time job, was treasurer of a well-regarded club, and I joined a group of students in forming a new advocacy/awareness group.

Still, I was absolutely pathetic. I never slept, and I'd be awake until the sun rose, playing Diablo II and hanging out on online Harry Potter forums with the impending release of the final book. And I tried skateboarding to be cool, I'd go for 5AM walks to Brooklyn Bridge and take photos with my shitty digital camera, and I wrote really bad poetic prose on friends-only journals. And I reveled in being alone because it was the simplest thing to do, chalking it up to the superficiality of New York, the ephemeral relationships, and the feeling that the city was in constant, unyielding motion. Only New York could make me feel so inadequate, and in my impatient youth, I thought it poetic to wallow in inadequacy.



In my first two years at college, I had a part-time job that had a lot of flexibility, which meant that I was sort of unreliable. I worked as a teacher's assistant through the work-study program, preferring to work in the few locations that weren't elementary schools. The first year, I worked at a middle school in Chinatown, assisting a 5th grade math class and an 8th grade study hall. The second year, I worked at a high school on the Lower East Side, assisting a 11th grade math class and a study hall. I've collected a few stories from my time there, like a substitute teacher that read a newspaper in class and handed me a piece of chalk, expecting that I'd take over the class. Then there was the math teacher that looked like Maggie Gyllenhaal. Or the one 8th grade kid from Dominican Republic that barely spoke English in a class full of Cantonese-speaking students.

My favorite was probably the study hall at the high school; it wasn't actually a study hall, but rather a room where teachers and administration would periodically send students as disciplinary punishment -- sometimes just for the day, sometimes for longer. Sometimes special ed students would come in. I didn't have to do much; mostly I just talked with them, read a little if they were up for it, or did puzzles together. Some of those conversations ended up being very familiar years later, when I was working at the youth drop-in center.

So passed the first two years of college. I had actually worked really hard to secure a Resident Assistant position, which was available once you became a junior; with my background in residence hall council and my strong desire to have full room & board paid for in an outrageously expensive city, I attended the weeks-long training/culling process for RAs. I pretended to be an outgoing but thoughtful person who loved to get involved. I didn't get the position.

Absolutely crushed and entering my third year, I decided to instead go for a study abroad in the spring semester, but instead of going to what I felt like were useless extended tourist stays in a foreign country, I looked for something I thought was interesting. At the time, I knew someone online who was from Australia, and we'd talk every day, even using the AIM texting feature back when texting wasn't as popular yet but AIM still was. I made it up in my mind that I wanted to go to Australia, and that I was going to find an opportunity that would be "authentically Australian" and "career-oriented", whatever that meant.

I ended up applying to a specific program at an Australian university, found a university in the U.S. that had a study abroad program to that school, and then transferred those credits back to my actual university. Fairly ridiculous but somehow it all worked out, and whatever "authentically Australian" and "career-oriented" meant, I ended up in woop woop filled with civil servants and pollies aka Canberra. But I loved it, still; I'd used to run around the Parliament House with the other interns who were from all over Australia, including the two Sydneysiders, the Alice Springs girl with the wicked accent, the Bendigo boy, and the Southern Australia girl from wine country. At the time, Labor was in government, so the internships were with the Liberals or Nationals -- I guess maybe they had more time to spare. My internship was with a fiery young female MP who regularly said controversial things but was otherwise unknown. While she was offensive and fought for causes I didn't agree with (in her younger days, she was a staunch monarchist), she was also incredibly amusing and even sent me on a trip out to her electorate for a few days where I stayed with a staffer and explored rural Victoria.



The internship as a whole was something I would've never experienced in the U.S., or whatever version exists with the Congress. We had full access to the Parliament House, I rode in an elevator with Tony Abbott, I attended Question Time every chance I got, and I partied away budget week with a Senator and MP in the Nats. In my spare time, I would eat chicken schnitty at the bar with my friends, walk around Civic, and held a job at the Australian Press Club as a server for their large functions making close to $20 AUD an hour. And after the semester was over, I took the final weeks to travel up to northern Queensland with the money I'd saved up from working at the Press Club.

When I came back home, it was already well into the summer, and I was soon to be entering my fourth and final year in college. By that time, though, I really only had one more semester left to complete the credit requirement for graduation, so I knew the year would be spent on my final senior project for the most part. I'd also be coming back to policy debate, a new activity I had discovered in the fall semester before going to Australia in a course I randomly decided to take. For the first time, I started to connect with other students and feel like I could have conversations that weren't just the filler between beer pong in someone's dirty apartment or dancing at a club. For me, that felt like the norm of typical college students in New York. Perhaps for that reason, most of these students in debate weren't even attending the same college, but were part of the then-existing debate coalition.

And thus I dawdled away the few weeks I had left of the summer, stuck in a weird place where I had attended three years of college, had an exciting study abroad, filled my schedule with extracurriculars, but none of this seemed to lead to something I wanted to do. I even had attended a workshop on "whether law school is right for you", and I came out of it knowing it was a resounding no. Of course, the fact that I attended the workshop was enough consideration for my mother, who began from then on to prod me in that direction for the next few years. But the truth was that I realized I didn't want to do traditional politics, especially not federal "bigshot" politics in those outrageously competitive post-undergrad positions. Nor did I want to be steeped in any further debt, so grad school of any sort seemed out of the question, as all my college dalliances were at the cost of massive student loans. So where did that leave me?