Author Archive for Stacy

Should an 18 Year Old Really Know What They’re Going to Do For the Rest of Their Life?

Published by Stacy on April 4, 2008 in Learning. 29 Comments

A couple months ago, this exchange occurred between me and one of my parents’ co-workers, whom I shall call “J”.

“So, what do you want to do in college?” J asked me, right after we were introduced.

“Well,” I hedged, “I plan to sleep in, hang out with friends, and watch shadows elongate.” Pause. There was no flicker of recognition in J’s eyes; my sarcasm went over his head. “Um, basically—not much.”

J looked at me in askance. “I mean, what do you want to do?”

And this was when the College/What Are You Going To Do With the Rest Of Your Life? Interrogation started. Believe me, after going through this numerous times—it deserves its All Caps status. (My most sincere apologies to Strunk Jr and White, may you guys R.I.P. and not, you know, haunt me from the grave or anything.)

There’s something about one’s last two years of high school that dictates that any conversation you have with an adult, may it be your relatives or a near-perfect stranger in the supermarket, has to revolve around college. Once they know that you’re a senior or a junior in high school, the interrogation begins.

It’s a rite of passage.

It’s also a nuisance.

By November, I’ve mastered the art of listing all my ten colleges in one breath in order of preference. From Bryn Mawr and NYU to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.*

Which is not to say that I haven’t been guilty of using college as a convenient conversation starter because “So, how about ‘em Yankees?” is too overdone and cliché. Even so, this doesn’t make it any less annoying to 16-18 year olds everywhere.

“I’ll probably major in Anthropology and maybe minor in East Asian Studies–Japanese or Chinese.”

“Ah, Anthropology, huh? Like Indiana Jones!”

“… Uh, no.”

For most, this also involves a lot of nodding and glazed expressions when I try to explain the difference between Anthropology and Archeology. Occasionally, someone will ask what I will do career-wise, and I’ve learned by now that there’s really no good way to say “not a clue” without sounding like an idiot.

Because I honestly don’t know what I want to do for the rest of my life after college and grad school.

I envy my friends who know exactly what they want to do, because I still haven’t got the slightest idea. My plan is to take a lot of different classes in college and pretty much wing it, for lack of a better word. I’ll figure out where I want to go from there. Currently, I plan to major in Anthropology and minor in East Asian Languages (Mandarin Chinese). What I end up doing after college? No idea—even if I stick with Anthropology and Chinese for the next four years. I’m a fickle person and I’m interested in many things—creative writing, political science, international relations, history, languages, etc. The sky’s the limit.

It still amazes me though, how as students we’re expected to know what we want to do with the rest of our lives. Every time someone asks, I always have to smother a mad giggle—I’m so indecisive that it takes me fifteen minutes to decide what flavor of ice cream I want from Ben & Jerry’s—and they want me to tell them what I’ve decided to do for the rest of my life? It’s laughable. I can’t pretend I know what I want to do when most of my college friends have changed majors at least once during their time in Academia Land and knowing that there is a reason behind why many adults go back to school so they can change careers.

Maybe it’s a generational thing: in the past, there weren’t as many options for high school graduates but with more and more students going to college, there’s more of a disconnection. Yet there’s still the expectation from adults for us to know what we’re going to do with our lives by th time we’re 16-18.


For students who know exactly what their future profession is and are dead-set on pursuing their dreams, I want to say that envy them more than words can say.

However, for students like me who are still trying to figure things out, I wonder if this expectation will ever become less of an issue and burden as more students choose to pursue education beyond high school.

*I didn’t end up applying to all those colleges. After a certain point, all the paperwork just made me want to hide under my desk for all of eternity. As of March 21st 2007, however, I’m now a Bryn Mawryter so all’s well that ends well (theoretically-speaking).

  1. Photo by Franco Folini on Flickr

Average Just Doesn’t Cut it Anymore

Published by Stacy on January 12, 2008 in Learning. 36 Comments

To a perfect stranger, I am an overachiever.

I’m taking three AP classes (after dropping AP Stats because math and I are not a good combination) and two semester electives as my senior course-load. I’m president of my school’s Asian-American Club. I am also involved in my creative writing’s class literary magazine, National Honor Society, AP Student Tutoring, Link Crew, and African-Latino Club. I volunteer at the library on Sundays, I sang in the school chorus from 6th grade to 11th, and I played piano like every Asian kid in the U.S. (the ones who weren’t already saddled with violin).

Through the eyes of my parents, I’m the epitome of an ABC failure. I don’t practice piano anymore, I don’t play a sport (trust me—I’m doing it for the team, I cannot walk in a straight line without tripping), and I don’t have a 4.0 GPA.

Or maybe I should rephrase my first statement. To the perfect adult stranger—one who might not be up to date with today’s ever-inflating standards of students—I may seem like an overachiever when in fact, I’m not.

Not compared to my friends and classmates.

Sit at my lunch table and you’ll find a talented mix of students from all different kinds of backgrounds and ethnicities: two National Merit Semifinalists, one secretary of the National Honor Society, three all-state musicians, two star leads in our previous school productions, an editor of the school newspaper as well as director of a local amateur teenage-run theater group, and a partridge in a freaking pear tree.

Everyone at my table is taking three AP classes, if not more. Almost all participate in Link Crew or National Honor Society.

(Disclaimer: this might be a biased/limited overview since I’m basing this on personal experience and I take mostly honors/AP classes. Additionally, a number of the students in my classes are children of Cornell or Ithaca College professors/staff.)

The truth is that being an average student doesn’t really cut it anymore. It used to be that if you get A’s and B’s, you can probably get into a decent school. Or that if you’re valedictorian, you can pretty much write yourself a ticket to any school.

Nowadays, it’s not enough just to get good grades. You have to play an instrument and two sports, volunteer, get straight A’s, attain a 1850+ SAT score, and hold some office in student council or club to even be considered many colleges—whether college admission officers would like to admit it or not. With more and more students applying to college each year, you have Cornell turning away 3 out of 4 valedictorians.

With the rise of their increasing expectations, there will also be the rise of students who will try to meet them. Just from a casual Google search of “Student overachievers” will result in a number of articles about the rise of overachieving students—students who feel like they need to be “well-rounded” in order to get accepted to a good college in order to be successful in life, as Lindsea has also covered in her post “One Sweet Dream”.

While being ambitious and responsible is great, I can’t help but feel bad for students like the ones depicted in Alexandra Robbin’s The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids. Thankfully, while my school is pretty competitive for a public school, it’s nowhere near as insane.

Although everyone I know is applying to at least one or two Ivy or Public Ivy league schools, many are also submitting applications to state colleges. Community colleges, however, are still looked down upon—just the mention of our local community college will be met with ridicule, even though it is one of the top community colleges in the country. We’re accustomed to high standards, although I sometimes wonder if we’re able to keep up with the ever increasing standards placed upon us by Above.

I’m currently happy and busy with all my extracurriculars. I participate in them because my friends are members and I sincerely enjoy those activities. I do them for myself, not because I’m trying to impress a Dean of Admissions. Too many of my peers join clubs (National Honor Society being a common culprit) only to have something to jot down on their college application.

Would you rather do something you enjoy or something that would impress others? Have you ever committed yourself to something simply to boost your resume?

  1. Photo by Aaron Michael Brown on Flickr
  2. Photo by Alexandra Lee on Flickr

Plagiarism: Not Quite As Simple As It Seems

Published by Stacy on December 11, 2007 in Learning. 41 Comments

My friends and I were discussing plagiarism with one of my favorite teachers the other day when he told us a story from when he was in college. One of his friends had gotten a permanent mark on her record because she accidentally plagiarized in one of her papers. She hadn’t cited or paraphrased a government act properly because she assumed that it fell under common knowledge. Unfortunately for her, her school had a strict plagiarism policy and that small mistake almost got her expelled.

The unspoken moral of that story, of course, was that it’s better to cite everything—just to be safe. Because something like that might happen to you someday. This got me thinking about how easily that could have been me.

While I don’t think teachers in high school are quite as stringent when it comes to plagiarism, I’ve heard more than my fair share of plagiarism stories. Some of them are hilarious in a “you’ve got to be kidding me” sense because it’s hard to believe there are students out there who will pay $24.95 for a poorly written term paper. Or that someone would simply print off a Wikipedia article and scribble their name on the back. One of my friends, a 7th grade English teacher, dryly recalled an incident when three students in one class printed off some of Shakespeare’s sonnets and tried to pass them off as their own. There are many forms of plagiarism; different layers that might not be as simple as “copy and paste, try to pass it off as own work”.

Yet when I hear the word “plagiarism”, I think of kids who copy someone else’s paper word-for-word despite knowing better. One of the reasons why I think plagiarism is so rampant is because it’s hard to define.

There’s really no concrete definition because it can be very subjective. Some teachers/professors are lenient when their students turn in papers that discuss ideas and themes other people have mentioned because many people may have similar interpretations. Likewise, there are only so many different ways anyone can summarize a book. Would that count as plagiarism?

Point blank: when do we cite and when do we not?

Even though teachers have lectured about the evils of plagiarism since 5th grade, I sometimes still find myself staring at the computer screen, unsure on whether I can copy my AP Environmental Science textbook’s definition of biodiversity or if I needed to paraphrase. Do I even know how to paraphrase that term when the textbook’s definition seems to leave no room for a more direct explanation? Teachers always tell students to reword things they write, but what if the student can’t think of another way to reword what they want to say? In this incidence, sheer laziness isn’t the factor behind it.

It’s the ambiguity of plagiarism that worries me. While I can understand if another student and I both turned in a paper with suspiciously similar wording, what if we both turned in papers with a similar thesis or we discussed the same themes/ideas?

The concept of having to cite themes and ideas (how do you know who to cite?) has always made me uneasy. Maybe it’s because throughout my high school career, none of my teachers have seemed to enforce it. If that’s the case, I wonder if I’m going to be in for a nasty shock when I’m in college. I have the unfortunate habit of picking up random phrases or ideas without noticing. So I’m really not the person who came up with that brilliant elephant analogy even though I thought I was.

Accidental or unconscious plagiarism aside, deliberate plagiarism is something I can’t excuse. Plagiarism is becoming more common now because the internet makes it easy for students to get a hold of written papers online. However, I’d like to think that most students (or at least the ones my age or older) would know that technology works both ways. Teachers now have plagiarism detection software and they can Google with the best of us. I’d like to think that they also know that FreeEssays.com is charging them a ridiculous amount of money for a “C” paper. And if they’re honestly trying to fool their teacher, reformatting their $24.95 essay might be a good idea—nothing tips off an educator quite as much as an unformatted paper that still contains hyperlinks, ads, and the name of the site from where she or he purchased it.

Now a truly ironic factor would be if I accidentally plagiarized within this very post. I’ve been careful not to Google or read any articles on plagiarism just in case so all of this is simply me going by what I know, but you can never guess. They say each writer has their very own unique voice and word choice, but maybe I have a writing doppelganger somewhere in the cybersphere.

To all you educators—do you have any funny or memorable plagiarism stories? I’d love to hear them.

Lastly, I’d like to thank Diane Cordell for recommending me for Students 2.0 as well as introducing me to the world of edublogging. She is one of our biggest supporters and her endless encouragement and belief in all of us has been incredible.

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Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported