Student Blog: Finding Out What Truly Matters

Up until August of 2022, I had not been in a classroom in almost two and a half years. The last time I had stepped into one was during my bachelor's degree, only days before the COVID-19 pandemic took over New York City. I was attending a fashion school back then and was really lost about what I wanted to do. Fast forward to now. I am preparing to start my master's degree in Global Humanities, moved to another city, my hometown, to start over fresh again. With several internships and jobs under my belt, I thought I knew what I wanted going into this semester, but I was proven very wrong by the end of the first month.

My vision of the future and my recent plans going into the semester included pursuing a PhD. Having worked in theatre and film during the pandemic, discovering how these industries could make an impact through an ethnographic lens, I had decided I was going to pursue anthropology. My dream was to conduct ethnography projects on women's arts, specifically theater and literature. This would mark a drastic change from what I had studied previously, which was International Trade and Fashion Business.

So I started graduate school this semester and thought this was my dream. Then I quickly began to realize the pitfalls of pursuing a doctoral degree, and that maybe this path was not for me. In my coursework and degree, a lot of it is interdisciplinary in nature. Often, as a young person trying to discover what is important to me and my life, I have been told that I need to do something specific, or I had to double down and pick a single topic of focus. We have to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer, make enough to survive. And to survive means you could not be more than one thing in the eyes of many people around me.

This semester reinforced a certain notion that I have been thinking about all along: everything is interconnected. Theater often is a political act, writers and actors approaching scripts and art in a process they know from their socioeconomic statuses and training. Art is a product of the times and societies we live in, which means you should have a core understanding of economics, development, and sociology in order to get a grasp at the bigger picture. I began often thinking about this during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially as I picked up a copy of Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls for the first time. As a writer myself, I ws thrilled by the poetry and music contained with her lines. I admired her work, and, deep down, was a little bit jealous because I felt trapped in genre and confines. I'm slowly breaking free of this way of thinking thanks to this semester, and the future genuinely looks bright.

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