School of Thoughts

I've been meaning to write a blog post for a while now. This is going to be an introspective blog post, so maybe more like a journal entry but one that you get to read if you want, haha.

For the past month or so I have been feeling out of place in my econ program. I just don’t think I'm doing anything important or anything that I am especially good at. They always say your first year is the hardest, so I wonder if this feeling will pass, but I'm not sure it will. These thoughts all started with my week and a half of midterms and paper deadlines. I felt really defeated and tired and fed up. I just spent hours and hours studying for tests and racking my brains for paper ideas and then I just thought, "Why am I doing this? I am not happy right now. I don’t think what I'm doing is helping anyone. I'm stressed." And then I just couldn't stop thoughts like these. As these thoughts were going on in my  mind I had several experiences that helped me process these thoughts, but not really come to any conclusions.

The book for the Relief Society book group was A History of the Present Illness. The book was a lot of short stories put together about the life of patients, doctors and medical students. And I just related so much to the medical student chapters. Some lines like, "I took a walk to remind myself of things like fresh air, sunshine, and that conversations existed without the words hemorrhage, boils and blood.…" That was paraphrasing. I'm not a medical student, but I did this exact same thing yesterday. I just couldn't do any more homework, so I randomly strolled around the village, hoping to run into someone I  knew so I could just chat with them. There was another part of the book where the first year medical students attended a talk by a famous doctor and they did not understand a single word. That happens to me ALL THE TIME. But the thing is, I'm not doing anything noble or good or useful right now but these medical students are. They are going to a lot of hard school to become doctors. They know what they are going to do and it will be a very good thing that they are doing. Me, I'm just learning math and stuff and can't save anyone's life and won't be able to at the end of my schooling. I don't think economists are super useful in general. Economists think economists are cool, so they have made this economist smart club and I feel like the whole grad school experience is just trying to get into that club. But it the club generating any useful research? Not really. The club wins some Nobel Prizes every year, but the club isn't curing cancer here. We are just poorly explaining this world that we live in. And we argue with each other and no one agrees on anything. Some econ papers to me are interesting; the idea is novel, the data use is creative, the writing is very good, but at the end of the paper, all I can think of is how much time that paper must have taken and how it really hasn't changed the world we live in. But it got published, so that author is considered successful. And that's a career. And that just really bothers me. That doesn’t sound cool to me at all, but that is exactly what I will be doing if I stay on this path. So that is what A History of the Present Illness left me feeling. Like I could have spent these grad school years in a more useful way.

One positive turn to this process was reading The Economist. How ironic, the Economist managed to cheer me up. This past edition included "A special report on America's Latinos" and I was SO STOKED to read it. But it was kinda of depressing. Because Latinos are poor, they have high pregnancy and high school dropout rates. They don't go to college. They get low wage jobs. Their kids are more likely to be obese, many are undocumented. But they are such a huge part of our young population. Currently the number of white babies and the number of Hispanic babies being born are the same in the US. So in a few years we are going to have a lot of high school dropouts or something has to change. And then I got to thinking, I could help change it. I could figure out a way to keep Latinos in school and to help them get better jobs. This sounds like something an economist could do. And I feel like I would have more credibility than the average white person, because although I am an elite Latina in the sense that I learned English, did well in school, never worried about my parents getting deported or not having a job, and am now doing a PhD, I am more Hispanic than a white person, haha. I don't think people in academic positions or powerful businesses really concern themselves with this problem. And I think this stagnation of Hispanics is a big problem. I look at my classmates and I really don’t believe that it is possible for poor Hispanic kids to get where I'm at. Because none of my classmates, including myself, come from that background. The Spanish speakers in my cohort are rich people from South America. The white people are rich people from the US. I think my family's income is among the lower incomes represented. And my family is really blessed and comfortable. The US's Hispanic population is just not being represented in higher education. So I think there is some work to be done there and I think it's useful work and I think I could do it.

The positivity built when I went to a graduate student reception hosted by the University. The dean emphasized what a wonderful opportunity it is to study at Berkeley, especially on a fellowship. And I realized, yes, this is incredible. Someone is paying for me to go to school and Berkeley is not a bad place at all to be. And last year at this time I was jumping for joy that I got into Berkeley, so why am I just thinking this is so useless. This is an awesome opportunity, how could I have ever considered to throw it away? And of course grad school receptions are supposed to pump you up like that, but it did make me feel a lot better. It reminded me that at one point in my life I really wanted to be here, even if right now I don't like it that much.

Then I listened to this episode of This American Life about two high schools in NYC that were three miles away from each other, but drastically different. One high school was private and was mostly white, the other high school was public and in a poor neighborhood of mostly blacks and Puerto Ricans. One theme of the show that struck me was that when the poor black or Puerto Rican kids did make it to college, many failed because they felt like they didn't belong there or that they didn't deserve it and they were just afraid and too skeptical to fully take advantage of the opportunity presented to them. And I feel like this a lot. I don't feel that smart compared to my peers. Not so much now, but at the beginning of the semester I was so worried of looking stupid. I'm still way intimidated by my professors and I don't really imagine myself excelling here. It feels too difficult. Sometimes I really think I was not endowed with the brain power that I need to succeed here. But listening to this story about kids who were in college and feeling these same things made me realize that I need to stop feeling intimidated. I should just take this opportunity and run with it. I'm here. I made it, Berkeley. You let me in. So I belong here.

The last small thing was a presentation I went to about how your rank in your class affects your success in school. They were basically arguing that if two kids with the same abilities were placed in a classroom where they were they smartest kid and the least intelligent kid, the kid who felt like he was the smartest would succeed more, even though both have the same intelligence. Hopefully that made sense. A simpler way of saying it is that you always feel smarter when you around dumb people. And I thought, "I am that kid. I would much rather be the best player on the worst soccer team than the worst player on the best soccer team." And I feel like I made that switch. I used to be the best player and now I'm not, even though I'm the same person. Berkeley is just a better soccer team. So I guess I felt validated that some professor actually did research on this phenomenon. And I came away with a good tip. The professor suggested that instead of stressing your class rank, you should stress your global rank. So globally, I'm doing pretty well, although within my class I'm not above average, haha.

So sorry for that spill of thoughts and words that aren't super interesting. They are just things I really wanted to say and write down. And for some reason it makes me feel better to know that you will read this. Feel free to leave lengthy thought posts anytime.