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On to New Destinations
Reflective Essay
When I graduated from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington with an English degree I was at a loss of what my next step along the path should be. Finding a good job, or almost any job, at the time was difficult and I found myself bouncing between different fields rather quickly, not truly finding one that could lead further towards my dreams and goals. I missed the challenge that comes with learning and the experience of new perspectives that often accompanies it, so I turned my aims and eyes towards graduate school.
Education has always been of stressed importance in my family, with my father’s side where most attended multiple educational institutions to gain multiple degrees and my mother’s side where most barely graduated high school, and only one attempting college before leaving. Both sides, though culturally divided, believed education was one of the most, if not the most, valuable tools I would need to succeed and grow into the person I wanted to become. I am unsure if my perspective on the value of education has changed since my beginning at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in the Masters of Applied Arts and Sciences Program, with the value already being so high, but I can say that I am leaving this journey with new perspectives and understanding of the ways of thinking.
During my short time between educational programs, graduating from UNCW and applying to UNCG, I bounced between possible careers, initially working a sales job where I spent entire days standing in various large stores like Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club selling DirectTV to customers shopping. It was incredibly draining and often exposed me to tempers and aggravation of customers who viewed me and my job as parasitic. Often if they were not angry or annoyed with me, I would be faced with public harassment by those who viewed me as a young woman trying to “sell” to them by using myself through nonexistent flirtation and false promise. Even after changing positions within the company to becoming an administrative assistant, I was still pressured to go back out to stores and sell products as I did before. This quickly pushed me to change career paths and I landed in a serving position at a country club. I was fortunate to be able to participate in events and, because country clubs are technically nonprofit organizations, I was able to connect with other nonprofit organizations both in the area and beyond. This work reminded me of my wonderful time as an intern working for a historical nonprofit during undergrad and was what pushed me to apply once again to better my educational path. I was able to change careers once again to jobs that would allow me the time to move forward with my education.
When starting on my path in the program I was incredibly excited and dumbfounded that I would be able to choose my own path through my education. Never has this been offered throughout my former educational years, having graduated from a private college prep high school into undergrad where I spent multiple years in a strict program for secondary education to teach English in high schools before electing to focus in English and Literature. Finding a program like MAAS was difficult in that I was looking specifically at schools that would allow me to continue my education but strictly through online interaction, as someone who is inclined to change and move on a whim. I spent months narrowing down the schools I had found, but after coming across the MAAS program there seemed to no longer be a need for a list at all. Forward to me being incredibly surprised at being accepted into the program with a lower GPA and credentials than usually accepted, and almost believing the moment was not real. Integrating into an educational program that not only allowed for individual creative thinking but pushed for, encouraged, and expected these actions was everything I could have wanted when continuing my educational path, a path that has only served to broaden my perspective and increase my individual creativity.
Choosing my first set of classes was slightly overwhelming as it was the first time that I was allowed full freedom of my choices. I wanted to choose courses that somewhat followed the independent thinking I discovered during my time as an English major in undergrad that pushed me to voice my opinion, hear others’, and reevaluate my own in turn. My initial classes were titled The Contemporary World, The Global Economy, and Design Thinking, all courses that I felt were going to force me to learn something new. The Contemporary World focused on global issues, a topic I was familiar with, but focused on “historical consciousness” to push us as students to look back at history, only this time we did not have a teacher that was “telling” us what happened, but instead was “asking” us what happened. This structure allowed us to tell history from our own perspectives and interpretations based on our own experiences, with few right or wrong answers along the way. As I studied the war in Vietnam during the Contemporary World course, I was able to study opposing perspectives in a new light and in my final essay I discussed modern colonization through war initiated in the name of “peace and freedom”. This essay looked deeper into the U.S.’s relations with Vietnam during and after the war was over, how the government was rebuilt in favor of U.S. relations. I relished in being able to insert my own experience into an important time in history and emerge from it with a fresher perspective on the events, equipped, of course, with facts but the only bias reflective in the learning was my own.
I found this experience similar in my time in the course The Global Economy but was faced with bigger new challenges in the course Design Thinking. In this course I created an internship for a nonprofit about a cause I felt personally connected: abused animals in search of a loving home. I have worked in multiple animal adoption agencies through the years and it can be emotionally straining to see such sweet and caring creatures with crushed spirits struggling to understand the concept of simple kindness and love. During this course I was once again finding a personal connection to nonprofit work but with the added understanding of the more finite details that are needed to operate an organization for success.
I found several courses along the way that have given me new experiences and perspectives that I never expected. The first to come to mind would definitely be Food and Film where we studied the dynamics of food and culture through the lens of film. The film “Tampopo” was the one that has stricken me to my core to this day, showing me somewhat disturbing but continuously interesting perspectives on the impact of food within cultures. Being partly Cambodian on my mother’s side, I thought I was prepared to understand the perspectives found in the film but was constantly surprised at each turn, whether we were discussing food and sexuality or food and personal identity. I completed this course with a new value on food and its representation among cultures, as well as new recipes to try on my own time.
A second course I found to be interesting was titled In Search of the Church, where we explored the roots of the modern church dating back to its very beginning, before its initial structure. I wanted to take this course to gain a better understanding of a category of my own life growing up, having learned about the two very different yet similar religious practices of Christianity and Buddhism. My mother grew up attending the Buddhist temple and, even though her attendance is far and few in between as there are only a few temples located in her area, she still takes the time to drive to Atlanta, GA for bigger ceremonies and events at the Buddhist temple there. My fond memories at the temple have helped develop my overall perspective on the morality of life but seems less significant in comparison to how often I was pushed to attend my father’s Quaker church. Often when I mention that I grew up mainly as a Quaker it brings a look of confusion to people’s faces as it is not a popular or well-known branch of Christianity. Buddhism and the branch of Christianity called Quaker are actually quite similar in practice and in philosophy, both leaning on personal development with one’s spirituality and connection with enlightenment, the definition being somewhat fluid. I wanted to take this opportunity to explore a course of religion that could give me a better understanding of a subject that is popular within our society but often judged on the basis of those who “yell the loudest”. Even though I attended church and even a private Christian school growing up, where I learned a multitude about the Bible and the religion, I was often surprised at its initial construction and the overall effect on politics that it seems to continue to delegate in our modern era. It gave me a new appreciation for the opportunities I was given to explore two culturally different religious paths by granting me a more critical lens and encouraging me to dissect a religion that is often either incredibly criticized or defended.
The third course on my list of most interesting and groundbreaking was titled Science, Environment, and Media. Environmental issues are a plenty in our everyday, and as we see now changing the course of our histories forever, but science was not often a subject I felt akin with and I usually avoided science classes in my education. I took this course specifically to force myself to learn about a subject that I actively avoided, caring about the environment but not taking the time to understand its inner workings and how we, as an invasive species, can create the change so desperately needed to fix what we have taken advantage of for so long. It was a learning experience to start again at the basic level of environmental science and combine this learning with how media can control what we see and how we interpret it. During this course I was able to take what I have had experience in so far, media and social discussion, and bring in scientific interpretation through a new lens of a non-scientist. I pulled this learning together for my final project to discuss the air pollution output by humans within industry for my final project, discussing the types of pollution constantly expelled into the atmosphere daily while using restricted resources. Humanity has become an invasive species, instead of living among nature we have taken to trying to force nature to live among us. In recent years this has become an obvious blight on our part as we have continued to develop industries and overuse resources to accommodate for our growing species but have been halted in production as resources are almost run out and pollution has overtaken our vision of an industrial future. I have been able to use the research I found and continued it in a slightly different direction for my next course, Contemporary Media Literacies, to discuss how corporations, industries, and even nonprofits have failed to use dynamic literacy to better communicate with the public their exact levels of environmental efficiency. The learnings I take from this class will continue to remain with me into my future endeavors, as I am sure it will with most of us in the course, and I hope it will help to lead me towards a possible career within environmental nonprofit work.
There were, of course, several courses that I enjoyed based on my own interests and experiences that geared more towards societal development and social justice. Three of these courses include Rights and Wrongs: Theories of Social Justice, Dangerous Minds: Understanding Terrorism, and Dignity, Identity, and Power, all of which center around gaining a deeper perspective on the inner workings of humanity and how we as a species have and continue to operate as a society. Rights and Wrongs: Theories of Social Justice was a familiar subject for myself based on my past experience in undergraduate studies. As an English major we often studied social justice within literature and through alternative perspectives of freedom, civil rights, and human welfare. I was interested to further that learning through this course, studying three separate stages throughout history of how freedom, franchise, and welfare were shaped within American history. It was interesting to develop further my perspective on reform within American society and how it has grown or changed within our modern era. I left this course feeling as though I could not only voice my disparities with a social and political context but could actually develop the argument to defend them with better understanding of alternative viewpoints and history.
Dangerous Minds: Understanding Terrorism was a course I chose to pursue as it was applicable, as much of the MAAS program is, to the issues and life-altering changes we have been experiencing in the past century. I was bettered in learning of how terrorism has developed and changed from a societal perspective since its initial start long before we would consider civilized society that we relate to today, as well as how to differentiate the term in modern conversation, rather than encompassing an act of terror within terrorism’s seemingly dynamic definition. An assignment that stuck out to me during the course was about viewing terrorism through a lens, this lens provided to us by those in authority, showing us what we are allowed to see. My purpose in the assignment was to discuss and evaluate how and why those who protect us do so through the actions and reasoning they have chosen. This is not to say that the protection is not appreciated or warranted but to simply questions the intent and the outcomes that accompany the shaped perspective we are given to believe. There are many acts of terror that we as a society have faced in the past several decades, however the general idea of terrorism and inciting terror in others has existed since the start of humanity’s society. By learning more about what terrors we face and their true natures we gain a better understanding of humanity, of the meanings behind actions of others who differ from us.
The course Dignity, Identity, and Power was an incredibly interesting course and aided in my understanding of the patterns of domination and the injustices we see as well as those that are hidden away from us or skewed in perception. Coming from a multicultural home I was able to view multiple perspectives within my family and how those perspectives helped to develop my inner sense of justice for those in need. My mother and her family came to America to escape the Khmer Rouge, communist dictatorship that had overtaken Cambodia, as well as many other countries within Asia, and had faced countless injustices there and along their journey. Hearing the stories that she recalls, which is rare as they easily take an emotional tole, are heart-wrenching. The continued pattern of terror and domination, however, contains two sides, as we learned in our class: the side of the dominator and the side of the dominated. The dominator believes the cause in which they take action for is justified, whether those actions are simply a means to an end or are the sole purpose to the act, at times led there through persuasion and at others through their own wants. There are, of course, those who will fight back against this pressing power, fighting for their own injustices and for those they care for, to break this pattern of domination to attain a better society. Though this may not often work, sometimes those leaders wish for the power themselves or do not have the means to obtain the justice they fight for, the change in pattern should never stop; just as injustices will never cease, neither should the push back for the dignity of the people facing domination.
My learned experiences and bettered perspectives that I have gained throughout my time in the MAAS program at UNCG will stay with me through the next phases of my life. I hope to encompass the independent critical thinking skills and the strong pull to change that brought me towards the program and that they have become developed in ways that I never would have hoped to achieve on my own. The wisdom I have gained about the world has changed me into a person that not only holds opinion for justice and creation, but as a person who takes real action to make real meaning in our modern world. I hope to go forward to effect change in the world as this program has effected change within me with a better knowledge and understanding of others, as well as a stronger respect for those who differ from what I know. I do not view this as an end to my path but the opportunity for new direction for my future.