going into my last year in college, i looked back at the ways that i have changed as a person throughout these few years. four years spent in college in order to get a degree (with no guarantee of a job), and countless mistakes and successes have sprouted out of my time at ucla. never in my life would i have thought i would end up in los angeles, much less with an internship in new mexico of all places, but here i am. the inevitable question does come up eventually: am i enough? did i do enough to justify the $180k+ spent to send me to somewhere just for the chance at a job? i could go over the positives of my time here for hours, but maybe it is time for me to look on the dark side.
as a disclaimer, much of the criticism i draw from comes from my mom, who is not one to pull back from expressing her more visceral emotions when it comes to what i do.
assuming ucla costs roughly $45k a year to attend, four years totals up to $180k without considering housing and food and my otherwise wasteful spending. what do i get out of it? one time my mom was talking about how college is really a scam: it is meant to make people think in specific ways and approach problems in ways that make them easy to control and effective at attaining a desired outcome. is that what i have become? did i spend four years here just to become another slave or cog in a machine? if that were the case, tons of money could have been saved by attending university in hong kong, where i would pay a mere fraction of what i am paying here for arguably the same thing, but i didn't want to. maybe a life in america enamored me so much that i couldn't resist, and my parents were gracious enough to entertain that. i was a junkie for something new, a life outside of what i called home for so long, or perhaps a search for somewhere else i could call home. i wanted something far away, but taken as my own in a way that i could not envision so if i were left in hong kong. the success would feel cheap, maybe too easy just because i did not have to leave home to get it.