I feel privileged

My childhood was very neutral. It could’ve been better, but it wasn’t terrible either. It was probably above average. Sure, I moved around a lot, and the immigration process was challenging, but I come from an educated, well-off family that settled in the Bay Area: it could’ve been a lot worse. I really cared about education, and so I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to pursue higher ed because I come from a family that valued it too and possessed the means. My parents, funnily, didn’t really push me in school like the stereotypical Asian parent early on in my childhood. I think they wanted me to have some fun as a child. I remember my dad once setting me aside and telling me I might not get into college during elementary school because my grades weren’t very good at the time. I just didn’t really care that much about learning as a child, and I just did the bare minimum. As I mentioned, I watched a lot of television. It wasn’t like I didn’t want to read books; it’s just that my family didn’t really instill language skills in me early on because they weren’t native English speakers. It wasn’t exactly their fault, and language and children don’t teach themselves.  

Anyways, never mind childhood. I do feel very privileged to be in architecture school doing exactly what I want to do. I feel this is a great opportunity to work on my upper-level English even more. It’d be nice to do something productive in my free time. I keep thinking about why I want to be an architect. As a child, I had a natural penchant for being studious and for organizing things. I also “played” video games like Roller Coaster Tycoon and The Sims, where I designed parks and houses but didn’t play the actual game. I was good at math, but I wasn’t interested in computers enough to need advanced technical knowledge. That’s probably why I left MRI, a field that, at the end of the day, is founded on advanced computational principles. Architecture math is a lot easier than MRI physics (because it’s easier to visualize), but architecture isn’t just about math and engineering; it’s also about history, culture, art, and people. In that sense, architecture is sort of like medicine: it’s both an art and a science.