The Neighbourhood

Welcome to my neighbourhood. Here you’ll get a firsthand account of what environmental factors shaped me and my diverse interests.

Though I do not consider myself to have a true home yet, many places hold great significance to me.

I would switch my boombox to the most intensive rap station at night despite it being inappropriate to listen to at that age. I didn’t know what most of it meant. I didn’t need to. As long as the beat was poppin’ and my feet were stompin’, I didn’t care what they were actually saying.

Every aspect of my life, and specifically my interests in foreign cultures and music, can be traced back to where and how I grew up. I am writing about some of these places and characteristics today to offer some background about myself.

The Early Years

I come from a very musical family. My grandmother plays a variety of instruments and was a piano teacher until only a couple of years ago when she switched to teaching Tai Chi. My mother sings well and played the French horn in her high school band, toured with dozens of bands to film their concerts, and dabbled in acting. My older sister has played the oboe, the flute, the ukulele, and sings. Aside from the fact I was only three years old, it did not entirely come as a surprise when I was sitting in the back of my mom's car when The Black Eyed Peas' song "Where Is the Love?" came on. I began rapping every line, word for word, without warning and without fail. Despite my mom raising me on Bon Jovi and my dad raising me on 2000s country music, I was a young rap god. I would switch my boombox to the most intensive rap station at night despite it being inappropriate to listen to at that age. I didn’t know what most of it meant. I didn’t need to. As long as the beat was poppin’ and my feet were stompin’, I didn’t care what they were actually saying.

Between the ages of two and six, I spent a lot of time in Latinx/Hispanic households. My neighborhood is fairly diverse, not that I knew what that meant. The words "diverse" and "diversity" were peripheral to me; I didn't know what "diversity" was because I lived it and it surrounded me. My mom grew up on the Pacific island of Guam. She, along with my grandparents, spent several years there and bounced around to various countries around Southeast Asia. Daily habits and traditions from Southeast Asian and Pacific Island cultures eased their way into my childhood. Christmas dinner at my house is Guamanian chicken curry over rice rather than a smoked ham or a Christmas turkey. Much of the decor in my grandma's house is from Asia or is inspired by it, and the childhood crafts my mother made with me often revolved around foreign cultures, such as making Chinese lanterns and Chinese dragons for the Lunar New Year. It wasn't long before my love and affinity towards foreign languages and cultures really paved its way into my life.

The Wonder Years

As I got older, my music career began to pick up speed. I wasn’t allowed to have an mp3 player for bus rides to and from school, so I would use other people’s music players. Once I finally got my own, I would sneak my twenty-dollar MP3 player into my room when I was eight years old. I used the microphone feature to record songs from my boombox speakers and then snuck my MP3 player on the bus with me the next morning so I could listen to the current top 10 hits on my way to school. At the age of nine, I had built half of a recording studio in my room, unbeknownst to my parents, and I had started taking up percussion in the school band. By the time I was in high school, I had taken up both marching and symphonic band and concert choir. I began learning music production techniques via trial and error, high school classes, and a class offered on Coursera through the Berklee College of Music. With these skills, I did a lot of mixing and remixing for a local metal band I had befriended. I also developed a very strong love for composing music. As I grew up, I quickly jumped on any opportunity to stream music, which I most often did through streaming sites such as YouTube, Pandora, SoundCloud, or playlist.com. In August 2012, I discovered Spotify just one short year after its U.S. release and quickly developed an ear for discovering underground or rising artists in the music scene.

When I was 9, my love for music, foreign languages, and foreign cultures collided. After a couple years of listening to Tokio Hotel's German albums, I had discovered the Korean boy band TVXQ, who found enough success in the Japanese market to begin producing and singing songs in Japanese. I was hooked on one song in particular and I learned all the words to it. In Japanese. Within the next year or two, I began listening to Korean pop music on the regular and started independently learning Korean in my free time. However, this wasn't the only language I limited myself to. I also began studying Chinese, Esperanto, and Dutch, using a variety of online resources such as Duolingo and grammar websites. This trend continued for a couple of years until I entered high school and was able to take Mandarin Chinese full time. It was not long after this that I decided to pursue a career path related to foreign languages and cultures. My altruistic nature very quickly led me to the field of international relations, and I had stuck with the major from my sophomore year of high school all the way through to my college graduation.

The Later Years

I was very optimistic when entering college, and I assumed that my major alone would be enough to succeed in the field of international relations. I did what I perceived to be all the right things; I was studying a foreign language, which I had switched from Mandarin Chinese to Russian in college due to my family heritage and my interest in Central and Eastern Europe, I got great grades, I was applying to internships, I participated in undergraduate research, I developed close relationships with my professors. Little did I know how competitive the field is. Personally, I'm not too big on competition.

Fortunately, I had one professor continuously push me to apply for fellowships and awards. I was awarded the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship to study Russian language and culture abroad in Kharkiv, Ukraine in 2019, and I was also accepted as an attendee to the fully-funded 2019 North Carolina Summer Policy Institute. It made for a busy summer, but my experiences are irreplaceable. I also thought this would improve my chances at securing a higher-end internship. Nope. No luck.

It also didn't help that I worked two or three jobs at a time during my college career, did not have access to a car, and unexpectedly switched tracks to graduate in 3 years rather than in 4 years. While this might sound like a slight "humblebrag," my decision to fast-track my graduation involved an immense amount of sacrifice. I could no longer study abroad in Prague, Czech Republic and I had to overload credit hours and take outside classes and exams to fulfil my requirements. I am forgoing a year of my college experience with my original class of 2021, and I missed out on my junior year summer, which most people use for their internship. You might ask why I decided to graduate early if I had to sacrifice so much. Ultimately, it's to save money so I can guarantee my financial security later in life. I'm very proud of that trade off.

The Current Years

As I'm searching for a job for after graduation, and now amidst the COVID-19 outbreak, I am realizing that while I have the soft skills to be employable, I don't really have any of the hard skills necessary to get a job in the fields that are now intensely hiring, such as technology, finance, marketing, online software, etc.

Naturally, this has wreaked havoc on my (and most others') perception that having a college degree will get you a job. Unfortunately, I was never able to have an internship because I couldn't afford a car, I worked three jobs at a time during my entire college career, and I "lost" my junior year summer because I decided to switch gears and graduate a year early. While the reasoning behind it attests to my grit, my lack of direct and/or "relevant" experience. may not help employers and recruiters look favorably upon my resume.

I am beginning to build up my skills in social media and data analytics. I have enrolled in online courses via Coursera and HubSpot Academy to learn programming in R and Python, SQL for data analysis, and social media marketing. I am hoping to eventually make my way towards data analytics because of how eager I am to advocate for others, educate others, and work with data. TBD on that update, but I am excited to build a skillset that will carry me and my career into the future as tech begins to integrate itself into even the most ancient of industries.