Tonight, I was sitting at the Argo Tea at Broadway and 22nd Street, chatting with a Wellesley prospective at her admissions interview… with me. I honestly don’t give much money back to Wellesley, so I figure one small way I can give back is by being a Wellesley admissions representative and doing admissions interviews. My time is worth money, right?
She started out quite timid and awkward in both speech and body language. She began by making a lot of statements and not knowing how to back them up. I wasn’t quite clear on what she stood for until we got to the subject of public health, which is an area of passion for her. Her high school sounded very diverse and had a variety of classes that I would have loved to take when I was her age: public health, sociology, Latin American history, engineering (okay, I wouldn’t have loved to take that last one). But once we got to the topic of public health, of her awareness of the disparity merely across public schools in terms of educating on topics ranging from menstruation to birth control to STDs, of her anger that so many kids grow into adults and have no idea what a pap smear or gonorrhea are, she really shined and was her authentic self.
She talked about wanting to pursue public health as a career, and how her parents, typical Asian immigrant parents, told her it was a terrible idea, and why spend all this time and money going to school and then come out making nothing? “Other people pursue these careers and end up just fine,” she said to me. “I’ll be okay. I just want to do something I’m passionate about that can help others. I don’t want people to be unaware of things they should be aware of.”
The last week has made me think a lot about self-awareness and what we all stand for as individuals. What are we all passionate about and care about? And this led into the conversation I had at dinner at my apartment tonight with my friend, who lives just a few blocks away. He told me he doesn’t think there are enough people who are consciously thinking about how they can contribute to the world more and be better people. That’s… sadly probably true. Most people are so unaware that when you point out the most obvious things about them, they immediately go into denial and reject the idea before they’ve had even ten seconds to think about whether what we’ve said could be true. We’d be a better world if everyone consciously spent more time thinking about their own self-improvement and how to take action on that. He joked that it probably would be a great religion because there’s really no religion either of us could think of that focused on self-improvement.
The level of delusion that most people have is so ridiculous and depressing. I think the idea of a religion based on self-improvement would be offensive to them.
