It’s happening!

I can’t believe it. After years of preparation, a lifetime of dreaming, and months of planning, I applied to SCI-Arc, received enough funding to attend, and am venturing down the path to become an architect. It’s funny because even in my acceptance of this path, which I know in my heart to be the right one, my mom still discourages it. My mom is a very test-smart individual (she got into the Harvard of China in her youth); however, she lacks real world smarts—the kind of smarts that I think is important. It’s funny how some of these things work out sometimes. 

Becoming an architect will pose its own unique challenges for me at the age of 37. For one, I will have to live like an impecunious college student once again. I’m already sort of in that setup now with my shared living situation on the USC Health Sciences Campus. I wonder if I will ever meet potential roommates at SCI-Arc with whom I want to live? I’m not sure, but I hope I will. The move will sort of suck, but moving always does. 

I still just can’t believe it. After all these years in the medical field and that experience of misery at a level I deemed unbearable, I finally got out and got into my top choice school. It feels like high school all over again, like I just got into MIT this time around because I didn’t get into MIT when I applied back in 2006. It feels like a form of redemption because, had I gotten into MIT when I was a high school student, I’d probably be an architect right now.