May 2023
I’ve decided that it would be a good idea to go to school on another bloody continent, in a language that she kinda sucks at. Ha! Next year, I’ll be starting school in France (sorry Andrew for my indecisiveness!) and spending the summer beforehand reconciling the fact that my life has officially started and that I’ll be choosing discomfort once again. Initially, I was considering some NESCAC schools, McGill, UBC, and Minerva.
This fall, I’ll be going to Sciences Po (I’m making this public knowledge, so I don’t change my mind for the 100th time), leaving North America (which I’ve grown to actually like), to yeet myself into discomfort once again. Sciences Po was a semi-odd choice, but I’ll be returning to North America for my 3rd and/or 4th year if I choose and finances allow.
My stomach has been perpetually hurting, and at every step along the way, I thought I would end up somewhere different. Ultimately, the final decision came down to where I thought I would learn the most and what kind of experience I would be the most satisfied with retrospectively. I’m obviously really bad at sticking to my decisions, so I thought Sciences Po would give me the most opportunity to try a mix of different institutions, teaching styles, and size of school.
McGill was my top choice for a while, where I’d study some combination of Math and CS, but some part of me is worried that leaving North America will leave me behind. I mean, c’mon, MILA is right down the street, but McGill likely wouldn’t be a great culture fit, and once again, I would be choosing exploration value and comfort over the very real considerations/downsides that I could articulate but just didn’t want to admit.
I will note that Sciences Po’s reputation is super bimodal. My France-based family will probably be excited to know I’ll be in town, my European confidants made it seem like the school should have been my top choice from the get-go, the Canadians are pleased with the novelty, and Americans are just confused or know about it because of its affiliation with Berkeley and Columbia (which I may go to in my last two years!). Classes in my first two years will be at least somewhat in French assuming I continue in the minor that I applied for and potentially take courses at Sorbonne. I’m pretty nervous but mainly excited, and special thanks to everyone who let me dump my anxieties on them and the current SciPo students who gave me the time of day : )
When I was a wee child, my very African father would give me a fun-loving (lol) lecture most days after Kindergarten. I’d walk into the kitchen to greet him, in my navy blue uniform, and there he would be hunched over the computer desk reading some article. He’d ask me what I learned in school that day, to which I learned how to fabricate a nice narrative that brought together the disparate snapshots that managed to stay in mind from the day. He'd then ask me to tell him what was on my agenda for the rest of the afternoon, and some days I would be roped into his spoken dreams of his eldest child - his only daughter - going to university one day. The post-kindergarten lectures would one day end, but they’ve popped into my mind more frequently as of late. I didn’t relish in his fantasies. I did okay in school and spent too much time on the family computer watching cartoons and doing typing tests. Some nice positive reinforcement from school along the way, and I decided there wasn’t any point not to try, not to succeed according to some standard I fail to articulate. I guess now when I’m in the deep depths of despair, I can look at the sole box on his checklist and say it’s been successfully ticked.
This year has been retrospectively weird. I went from travelling for the first time alone, arriving at the airport, a very cautious 3.5 hours before my flight, to being the type of person, who almost misses her flight, sprinting to the gate. I developed a somewhat unhealthy need for novelty, started online high school, earned me some deep technical debt (someone be my math tutor lol), brought back freestyling as a hobby and typed many words on my computer - some of which are now public, found some really great music that I binge listen to for hours a day and met many cool people.
What better way to test your limits than to leave everything you know and start again lol