Ever since I was young, I’ve always had a strong passion for learning new languages. In middle school, I attempted to learn French by myself but sadly, it proved harder than it looked. In high school, I developed an interest in learning Korean and Japanese. Unfortunately, my high school did not offer any language courses other than Spanish, which I was already fluent in. Therefore, when I was applying to colleges in my senior year of high school, one of the most important criteria I looked for was if a school offered Korean and Japanese classes.
When I was applying to Wesleyan, I participated in an Alumni Interview. When I told my alum interviewer about my interest in learning languages, she mentioned that Wesleyan had an extensive East Asian Studies department. Thus, this was one of the monumental factors in my decision to attend Wesleyan.
Once I got to campus in my freshman fall semester, I began taking STEM courses as a proposed STEM major. However, thanks to the open curriculum, I also took a Korean and a Japanese history course, both under the College of East Asian Studies major. As I took these CEAS courses alongside my STEM courses, I began developing an interest in the culture behind the languages as well rather than only focusing on the language itself.
By the end of my freshman year, I had officially dropped my STEM major and decided to pursue a path with my business and entrepreneurship interests as well as my humanities passion. Nevertheless, even though I had started to step in the direction of the path I truly wanted to pursue, I still wasn’t really sure what my two interests had in common or how I could practically connect them in the workforce.
Thus, I continued on this exploratory path throughout my sophomore year and it wasn’t until my junior year fall semester that I finally found an answer. In particular, I came to an enlightening realization thanks to my Storytelling in the Japanese Empire class with Professor Aalgaard. Because this was a small discussion class and the texts we dealt with consisted of heavy topics, it forced me to critically think about the economics of human beings and how much capitalism and empire are deeply rooted in human individual decisions.
Further discussion with my professor on the class content’s application to the real world helped me realize that my passion for business was rooted in my interest in the people side of economics rather than the data side. There is a big misconception that STEM-concentrated fields like finance and humanities don’t go together. However, in reality, they are two sides of the same coin: the data and the people. A business cannot function if it only pays attention to the big data and numbers and ignores the consumers’ wants and needs.
This epiphany that combined my passion for humanities and my skills in economics was one I was only able to come to due to Wesleyan’s interdisciplinary learning. As an FGLI student, before I became a QuestBridge National College Prep Scholar, I wasn’t even aware of the existence of liberal arts schools. I never knew that this mode of interdisciplinary learning existed and that I was allowed to pursue more than one interest, even if they were in completely opposite fields. I am grateful I was given the opportunity to attend Wesleyan and that I was able to find the connecting factor between my interests, which allowed me to develop my story.
