Before I die...

Before I die, I want to live.

I have big plans for my future actually. Beware, it is pretty specific.

After I graduate San Diego State University with my Bachelor's degree in Social Work, Spanish, and History, I will join the workforce.

I won't go back to college for my Master's, sorry Professor Cosio.

I want to work at an office full-time, with great benefits, good pay, and a good retirement plan. I have already made up my mind that I will not get a job right away with the majors that I studied in college - or at least I can use my Spanish in conversation or working with clients. I just have to make money - good pay, good benefits, and move up quickly in the company.

The reason why I want to get just any job is because I need to pay off my student loans, regulate my credit card, repay my amazing mother who supported me my entire life, and save up for future trips.

I'll be stable within the next 1.5-2 years, then I will get married by the age of 25 and move out to live with my future husband. Our honeymoon is at Jeju Island in South Korea.

I want to travel to different places with my fiance, as we love to go to new places, try new foods, go on adventures. I want to go back to my hometown - South Korea, and try all of the street foods that they have to offer. It has been seven years since I have last been to Korea, and I miss it very much. We also want to travel to Europe, Canada, other parts of Southeast Asia such as Thailand and Japan, and go back to my fiance's hometown as well in Panama.

I'll continue working with the company for at least five to ten years, then work at non-profit organizations. I would like to go back and work for what I majored in. I have worked with different groups in the past such as Holocaust survivors/elderly through my internship at Jewish Family Service, and with children (K-12) through my job at Girl Scouts of America. I want to continue working with different population groups such as veterans, survivors of torture, refugees, in order to expand my experience working with different people and build humility.

My ultimate career goal is to work at the United Nations (UN). I would like to work at a department of the UN and continue working there till I'm old and ready to retire.

I will use the entirety of my retirement money, and happily!!! I plan to settle down in the place that I had studied abroad to in my college years - Avila, Spain. A quiet and ancient province in Spain. I would like to live a very quiet life for the remainder of my life.


End Note: It was a great experience to write blog posts as part of my assignment of my RWS class. I see myself continuing to write a blog in the future when I pick up my career goal working at the UN and writing about my experience there.

Aren't We All 3?

According to Annie Murphy Paul's article "Secrets of the Most Successful College Students", there are three types of student learners: surface, strategic, and deep - respectively in that order. Surface learners do as little as they can to get by, strategic learners only care about the grade and not the material, and deep learners leave college with a deep and rich understanding of the material. After reading this beginning portion of the article, I couldn't help but to disagree that students are not classified into these three categories. Students are a little bit of each! Let me talk about myself:

A fifth year at San Diego State University, graduating in May 2019 with a BA in Social Work, Spanish, and History. When I first got admitted into San Diego State University in 2014, I was accepted into the International Business program. In the beginning, there were courses that I took which I could not fathom  at all. My first two years of college, I was just trying to get by and tried my best just to get the "A" because I could not for my life understand MIS or accounting. In this case, you could say I was a surface-level and strategic-level learner. When I had changed my major to Social Work and Spanish, I finally understood what I was learning and took that material to real-life situations. I was doing well with my grades, but there were courses I just had to take to graduate - to get by. And the reality is, is that life happens. I worked multiple jobs all throughout college; balancing out priorities was difficult every time there was a change such as a new semester or a new job or an internship. The truth is - I was not always inspired or tried to understand the entirety of the material that I was learning. It was impossible to. In between four other classes, work, relationships, activities, and other commitments; it was impossible to be the deep-learning student all four (or five) years of college. Yes, students burn out too. There are times we just have to get by and we drop from deep-learner to surface-learner. It's difficult to keep that consistency of deep-learning style.

Above all, I am proud to announce that I am graduating this May, and I consider that one of my greatest successes. Success is not determined by the type of student learner you are. I believe that every student is a little bit of every type of learner: surface, strategic, deep. And I can say from experience that deep-learners are not the only ones who are successful in the world. I believe Annie Murphy Paul's viewpoint in success is a different kind of success. However, I believe that her view of success and how it is measured is not the same success that I envision. I do believe, though, that when we take from what we have learned and apply it to real-world situations, then the education that we have received was not in vain. It was a success.

"I"

As many would agree, we were trained and conditioned not to write "I" in our essays. That word was strictly forbidden in professional writing and if you wanted to be a good writer! All throughout middle school and high school as well as my first college RWS class, all of my prompts did not ask for my opinion - just to constructively write an essay based on what I think without sounding too opinionated and restraining myself from using the words "I", "me", "personally". Not until my previous RWS class, my professor had us write all of our short papers and essays using our opinion using the word "I". It was very uncomfortable at first, being so accustomed to straying away from the word "I". For me, it was so liberating to speak out what I wanted to say. I got my assignments done quickly because I could just use the word "I" instead of carefully working around using that word.The transition from objectivity to subjectivity was empowering and allowed me to articulate my own opinions into my writing rather than feeling restraint. Even this blog, I appreciate that I can give an out-pour of my thoughts into an academic setting. After all, we are the minds that make the future, so why not learn to express our thoughts in an academic setting?

Through blogs responding to a rhetorical situation, it allows them to enter into the discussion room on the situation. The writers make their position seem relevant by putting context of the rhetorical situation into their writing and often comparing the rhetorical situation at hand to other rhetorical situations or past issues that are of relevant concern. Thus, this makes readers side with the op/ed of the writer who has put their opinion out there with general context as to what led them to their opinion.

If I were to respond to current rhetorical situations, I would definitely respond to these rhetorical situations: the government shutdown and the Catholic priests holding nuns as sex slaves and nuns being told to get abortions. I stand against the president's reason for elongating the length of the government shutdown and making strides for his border. I am against the way he undermines immigrants in a rude manner; especially since many people have loved ones who are possible deportees. For the second rhetorical situation, I am just appalled by the entire thing. There is one too many issues to cover with this situation - abortion, teachings of the church, repertoire of the church.

Lastly, I just want to conclude by saying op/eds will appeal to certain audiences while it may be unfavorable to other audiences. This is because op/eds lean to one side that a group of people may also be in favor of and support the opinion. On the other hand, these opinions may be perceived a different way and simply refuted by other groups of audience. Which is completely natural, everyone has their own set of beliefs and opinions and they will always try to flock to those who share similar values.

Fake It 'Til I Make It

Imagine carrying a bag with different costumes and a set of instructions for each costume. We will call this bag the Discourse bag. Before walking into the school building you open up your Discourse bag and pull out a professional uniform with glasses and an apple. The directions for this costume read: "Take attendance, open computer file for next lesson, teach lesson, eat lunch during break, be kind and respectful to students by valuing their opinions and time, smile." After you finish the school day, you drive over to the bistro and pull out a different outfit from your Discourse bag and change into your all black uniform with directions to serve customers wholeheartedly in order to get tips. According to Gee, with the appropriate costume you can take on a role that others will be able to recognize (Gee 7). At school, students call you "teacher" and at the bistro, customers call you "waitress". Just as Professor Erin addressed in her blog, she wore business attire instead of her normal casual attire when in a different setting performing a different role.

I've had a few moments in life where I had to "fake it 'til I made it". Dress the part, look the part, act the part, speak the part. Not so much be someone I'm not; rather, looking like I know what I am doing because life doesn't slow down for me. When I became an intern at Jewish Family Service, I dressed professionally for my orientation and I am glad that I did because the building and its workers all dressed up business to business-casual. I continued dressing business/business-casual (which is currently the type of attire I normally go for now) whenever I was in the office and presented myself to my clients. My clients were 1st or 2nd generation Holocaust survivors, so they had different forms of trauma whether first-hand or second-hand trauma. The case workers from JFS (Jewish Family Service) conducted professional services with their clients and I tried following this standard as well. While tagging along with the case workers to visit different clients, I tried imitating the way the case workers spoke to the clients. I knew that this was not only to help me learn how to speak to the clients while wearing the hat as the intern, but also because I was representing Jewish Family Service as a whole. The internship was unpaid and I was required to do my internship for 16 hours per week, so it was the matter of focusing on my personal experience and growth to intern at JFS rather than focusing on keeping the job for money.

I had about 3-4 clients I would see on a weekly basis. Since my clients were all much older than me and had lived out their entire lives, I had no clue how to help them with their life problems such as helping them cancel their credit cards used to pay their insurance, compiling a file of dental insurance issues for one client, helping another client with her worker's compensation case that she had been working on for 20 years, helping 2 clients publish their stories, attending court with 2 clients, and sending out a mail (I forgot what to write on an envelope to mail out items because I have only done so once in 3rd grade). I just had to roll with the punches - accept the mission, research what I had to do, and provide my clients with the help they need. It was definitely an interesting semester interning at JFS, not knowing what to do at all; but coming out alright.

Classification Of My Own: "The In-Between"

 

I was born in South Korea, raised in San Diego. I moved to America when I was four years old. Before I moved to the States, I was fluent in Korean and was comfortable with my surroundings. I remember always acting cute in front of my grandparents to get what I wanted, eating my favorite black bean noodles, and getting candy from the chicken lady. When I moved to the States and attended my first day at kindergarten, I was mortified. Everyone around me was different and spoke a language different than I did. Soon enough, I quickly forgot Korean and absorbed the English language like a sponge. I became fluent in speaking English and struggled speaking in Korean. I knew what my parents were saying, but I couldn't speak Korean back to them. I still ate Korean food, practiced Korean etiquette at home, and did gestures only Koreans would do. In the eyes of outsiders, I was Korean. But here's the thing - in the eyes of Koreans, I was American.

The first picture is me wearing a hanbok, a Korean traditional dress. I wore this to a Korean Culture Event, representing the Korean culture by wearing the hanbok. The second picture is my sister and I at the naturalization ceremony to become U.S. citizens.

Actually, growing up I had difficulty finding out who I was. Americans called me Korean; Koreans called me American. Meaning, I was not accepted into either community. In elementary school I hung out with my friends who were predominantly Mexican. However, in middle school my Hispanic friends pushed me away and formed their own group to just hang out with the Mexicans. I was confused and started hanging out with the Asians. I felt comfort in the sense of belonging, but at the same time I didn't feel like I had any close friends. In high school I was even more confused. I hung out with peers of different races but I felt as if I didn't know who I was. Was I acting more Korean? Was I acting more American? I tried to just be myself, which I felt happy with. However, the way I felt had no identity label. It was only till college I realized that I will of course look different in the eyes of different people - whether American or Korean - but there were others who felt the same way growing up as an Asian in America. We made our own classification - and I was okay with that since I finally had a sense of belonging. I am a Korean-American. I am ethnically Korean and my nationality is American. And there are many of us Asian-Americans who will face that same identity crisis growing up. Some may push away the Asian in them, some may push away being American. But I learned that it is important to accept and embrace that it is okay to be "in-between". That is where I stand and an army of us will keep growing.