After taking a tour of the campus and attending the Engineering Information session, I was convinced that McCormick could offer me the most holistic yet in-depth learning experience. McCormick’s faculty promotes student exploration in other areas of study by encouraging an interdisciplinary approach towards education, which I think it crucial to a student’s learning experience. Taking classes in different departments will allow me to explore different areas while still staying on track for my degree...
Comfort zones are a restrictive force on the limitlessness of humanity. I live life with an “oh what the hell,” philosophy and take pleasure in the resulting experiences. If I were bound by a narrow comfort zone, it is unlikely that I would have thrown on a bright-orange oil-rig jumpsuit and crawled underneath my grandmother’s manufactured home to rewire her cable drops. Did this particular activity cause me to discover that my true calling is entomology? No, but it did save $400, set up cable access in my grandmother’s bedroom, and it has provided a modestly interesting anecdote to retell from time to time...
Hot chocolate. The perfect remedy for an aching heart or a defeated soul. The dissipated soul masked by the shadows of the night took a sip and cried for the hundredth time that night. I traced my fingers along the line of her wrist; she winced in pain as the hands which were meant to hold her and cherish her, had stabbed her. With bloodshot eyes and apparent scars, she screamed an untold tale. We lay in silence allowing the darkness to conceal us. I closed my eyes. The whips, the yelps, the growls – all comes back. The puny creature, my mother under the atrocities of her husband and her eighteenth year of ordeal...
Juggling the multi-faceted life of a teenager is like walking blindfolded on an acrobatic rope, a hundred feet above the ground. There are no safe dungeons where you can hibernate and wait for this phase to pass. Exactly, It’s just a ‘phase’; It’s not forever. Being a struggling teenager, I can empathize with those trying to find a place to fit in. I have had first hand experience with household trauma, teenage heartaches, sexual harassment, peer pressure, bullying and all such ‘evils’ of this phase. But unlike me, a lot of my acquaintances got webbed in the aftermath mayhem...
Every person in that hospital ward was holding his breath, praying and nuzzling his lucky charm for a miracle. The man lay torpid in front of us. And many of us had given hope when suddenly his fingers flickered to life. He meekly opened his eyes and lifted his right hand, then his right foot and shifted his weight. His vitals were stable. Every organ was performing its respective function. Finally, our assiduous toil was over...
As the first rays of the sun mark the beginning of a brand new day, I wake up with a pristine dream, infinitesimally small dreams each day that would eventually forge a distinguished leader. When I was three years old, my uncle used to call me a ‘fledgling birdie’. Fascinated by a phoenix that revives from its ashes, even as a kid I wanted to fly high, to rise, fall and soar again...
Some bungee jump; I debate. I’ve never tried hurtling myself down an abyss, but it sure felt like it on February 12th, 2011 when our team faced La Salle College - the reigning champion of the Hong Kong Schools Debating Championship. I was on stage, walking towards the podium in front of three hundred of Hong Kong’s brightest students, all holding their breath for the epic final duel...
In third grade, my mom told me I was a princess. Not the type of princess who wears pink chiffon and has long golden hair, but one whose history was so marred by discrimination, her people had lived in shame and secrecy. I am the great-granddaughter of the last chief of the aboriginal Ketagalan tribe of Taiwan. For generations, aboriginal roots have held connotations of savagery and poor class. Every native was thought to be undeserving of all human privileges, and after the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, the Ketagalan tribe was forced to assimilate into "civilized" society. Our aboriginal heritage became a vulgar taboo, an inescapable curse on our blood that burned my ancestors with humiliation...
It was Valentine’s Day six years ago. There were no roses, chocolate, or any romanticism in the air; there was instead, the scent of puke, fear, sea spray, yet a trace of freedom. It is mind-boggling what a human being is capable of enduring for liberty, even risking life itself. On the eve of my third attempt at attaining freedom, I contemplated in my eleven year-old mind, what I had been denied my native land...
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