I have a training assignment to do for this volunteer organization I just joined. I have to give a presentation on something I'm passionate about and break it down to be really simple and understandable to anyone. Today two people presented, one on cool environmentally consequential chemical research and then the other on brewing specialty coffees. It should be pretty easy for a UChicago student to share some cool quirky interest with their peers, after all, isn't that what they look for in the application process? Except I don't have any passions. I am fucking receptacle for the ideas of others. I absorb and regurgitate. In my spare time I go on fucking Tumblr or listen to podcasts. I value individuality and autonomy, but there is nothing about me that is original. The crux of my personality is openness followed by introspection. I like thinking about art and social issues and economic problems but I know no solutions. I generate nothing of my own. I am a leech. I simply do school, then get anxious about school. I like math, but a subject like that is either uninteresting or impossible to be made simple. I am out of touch with the world and there's no need for me here. I don't have anything to share.
Everything is too much fucking effort. Friends are hard to make, and once you make them you have to sustain that relationship continuously, so what's the fucking point? They'll fall away anyway, and I don't want that kind of commitment. I am only comforted by talking to my boyfriend incessantly. I talk to the people I live around but they are mostly twats anyway. I find extreme faults with nearly everyone I encounter. What's the point in doing something fun, pursuing a hobby, when there is studying that can be done? It's funny that I'm the polar opposite of your stereotypical immediate gratification valuing teen. If something gives me a bit of joy, what's the point if I can't put it on my resume or if it doesn't show up on my transcript?
I love learning, and I'll still learn always, but I won't be able to creatively live a life that I consider successful without money and status. I am going to be a corp whore because of this. No matter how much I wish to retaliate against the values that my parents have, show them that there's more to life, I'm going to realize that I don't think there is any more. I'm stuck and on my way to becoming an investment banker or consultant or trader or something, because I can do numbers but mostly because I simply don't know what else there is to do. And people are going to think I'm great because of it. My parents are going to tell their friends who will tell their children, and I'm going to be That Girl, the one in the Asian social circle that young people aspire to be and then despair that they won't be. Just by getting that ACT/SAT score and going to UChicago and studying math and now getting this internship, I already am far into being That Girl.
I think that the cycle has already started, me going to this fucking elite circle jerk of a college, this college with such emphasis on both academic and corporate elitism. There won't be a week that goes by when I won't hear about J.P. Morgan internship metcalf consulting J.P. Morgan Goldman Sachs Wall Street Goldman Sachs investment banking J.P. Morgan Wall Street GS finance trading. All while the community immediately around me suffers from the effects of gentrification spawned directly by this very institution. I am certain that the corporate ladder, no matter how far I climb it, doesn't end in contentment. But I don't know which path does, and if I get high enough on this one, at the very least others will believe I'm somewhere great. I can only hope that eventually I'll believe it too.
-T.
I think that the cycle has already started, me going to this fucking elite circle jerk of a college, this college with such emphasis on both academic and corporate elitism. There won't be a week that goes by when I won't hear about J.P. Morgan internship metcalf consulting J.P. Morgan Goldman Sachs Wall Street Goldman Sachs investment banking J.P. Morgan Wall Street GS finance trading. All while the community immediately around me suffers from the effects of gentrification spawned directly by this very institution. I am certain that the corporate ladder, no matter how far I climb it, doesn't end in contentment. But I don't know which path does, and if I get high enough on this one, at the very least others will believe I'm somewhere great. I can only hope that eventually I'll believe it too.
-T.
