Hopkins is a diverse university where an incredible mix of cultures, academic interests and personalities coexist and thrive. Here is the section where you can publish your unique thoughts, ideas and perspectives on life at Hopkins and beyond.
For years, I’ve let numbers define me. The number on the scale. The number of calories consumed. The number of minutes spent exercising. It was a battle I fought silently, a war waged against myself, my body and my mind.
Unbeknownst to me, however, I, with that one click of an Outlook “Send,” ended up submitting four pages of drafts on this poem with all my personal thoughts on the subject matter: my ex-boyfriend. I was blissfully unaware of this for a while. But when workshop rolled around two weeks later, I realized my mistake.
On Election Night 2024, I went to bed feeling something I hadn’t felt in years: hope. Surely, I told myself, America has learned its lesson. Surely, we are a nation of progress and reason. I even reassured my friends — Don’t worry. We’re waking up to good news.
When my parents and I decided that I would study college abroad, we signed a silent agreement: Long breaks were for them; otherwise, I was free. Despite quietly signing this tacit negotiation, deep down I’ve known that I had to give up summer holidays to internships and research programs eventually. I dismissed this thought and made it my future self’s problem to breach the contract, yet when I got accepted to the intern abroad program I applied to, I knew I couldn’t postpone the discussion any further.
Aman. His name always sounded sweet in my head, but even sweeter — almost dizzyingly so — on my tongue.
I started working at BobaPop in January, motivated by nothing but pure curiosity and my love for milk teas — specifically brown sugar lattes. I thought: Hey, I like drinking boba, so why not try making it? How hard could it be to make drinks and take orders? Turns out, pretty hard.
I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve eaten oysters in my life, mostly because my mom is allergic to them, but a couple of weeks ago, I found myself eating an exorbitant amount of them with some college friends because of a 75-cent deal. There I was with my friends, ecstatically ordering oyster after oyster and laughing away, thinking, will life always be like this?
If there’s one lesson I can share with any Hopkins student, it’s that healthcare inequality isn’t just an abstract issue — it’s a daily reality for many of our neighbors. Even outside HCC, we all have a role to play in this fight.
By nature of circumstance, college students are forced — for the first time in their lives, for many of them — to become serious spenders. I should clarify: serious spenders, rather than serious spenders. They must retire from free-ride public schools and low-wage part-time jobs, the biweekly paychecks which they spend in one day online shopping and paying too-high upcharges for DoorDash or other food delivery services; now, they have tuition and textbooks and Lyft rates — plus tip — going to their volunteer or shadow positions, and they’re lucky if they have the time to supplement this hemorrhagic spending with a student job or federal work study.
Allegedly, moving slowly is yet another way to calm the nervous system. I think I first came across this idea in a short-form video where a flash of text crossed the screen, hovering over an image of a person going about their day. This text would say, “slow down,” after which, the individual would be relieved of all this tension – their shoulders would drop, they would unclench their grip from the steering wheel (how they were filming while driving, I still don’t know).
The dining table was overflowing on the Tuesday evening — sliced century eggs placed in a flower shape, crisp-skinned Peking duck, steaming vegetables in pork broth: These dishes were full of the taste and smell of home. My grandmother ladled out bowls of hot fish soup, reminding everyone that in Chinese, “yú” (fish) sounds like “abundance.” We displayed the Lunar New Year Gala on TV in the background with (less funny than usual) skits that we half-listened to while passing around plates of dried tofu snacks and pastries. It was a warm familiarity I had missed. For one night, it felt like I had never left for college.
I have been writing stories for a while now. I cannot remember for how long. Some time in elementary school I decided I wanted to be a writer, after some endless iteration of another Disney-inspired handwritten short story of mine. Though my writing looks a little different now, this future aspiration has not changed.
This semester is different because it’s my last one — whether that’s “last one ever,” or just “last one as an undergraduate,” I don’t know. But, for now, it’s my last one. There are so many options for what comes next, probably more options than I’ve ever had in my life, and I’m going into it with fear and nervousness but, above all, what feels like excitement.
It’s a running joke between my friends and family that I’m always talking to the wind. The breeze hears my bitterness, my overzealous conversations are lost to the zephyr, the gusts gather my grievances and my chattering chases the currents as they’re scattered like secrets never meant to be uncovered. Being at a school filled with big personalities and opportunities that I could barely even dream of, I often feel like I’m even less heard.
My day is spent floating through classes and meetings and conversations and responsibilities. I get home, make dinner, try to do work with my roommates even though 9 times out of ten, nothing ever gets done. And then comes my favorite part of the day: the few moments I daydream about all I want from life.
British author Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is my favorite type of book. Instead of a fast-paced plot with witty one-liners and gritty characters, the mind space accompanied by the story is a bit like having an entire afternoon to run one errand. Eventually, the task has to be completed but there seems to be an abundance of time to meander while daydreaming, prod at a few things that catch your attention and stumble across a memory to unravel. You pause. Bracing yourself, you tug.
As much as my seasonally depressed tendencies would like me to fall into the slumber of the hibernators, I have been trying my hardest to show myself kindness this winter by forcing myself into the cold. I am doing my best not to put my life on pause just because the sun sets at 4:30, no matter how uncomfortable that may feel.
Just as people scrutinize the skies under which they were born to determine their star chart — to figure out why they are a caretaker, why their last relationship didn’t work out or why they can’t eat raw carrots but only stewed — one can extract an unfathomable amount of information based solely on what they wanted to be when they were kids. Or at least I think so.
There’s a Maya Angelou quote that’s always resonated with me. It goes, “people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” I find immense value in this quote, and I come back to it whenever I am unsure of what I am doing. As a chronic overthinker, I tend to overemphasize the smallest minutiae of life when, in reality, I should be looking at the big picture. We as humans make mistakes. But it’s not our mistakes that define us, rather, it’s how we treat the people around us and show up for those that we care about.
I recently got coffee with a professor and I was, of course, ranting about school, classes, friendships and family. With a voice thick with frustration, I said, "People act like they're entitled to your time and energy.” All she did was stare and smile. After a minute or two, she replied, quietly but firmly: "Maybe they are."
