Unto The Breach

July 20th, 2022

Trials and tribulations

I am currently two thirds into the duration of my summer, and I have often found myself uneasy. As I go further and further with my work on three different research projects, I become fearful of my ability to complete them.

I've suffered a few setbacks in regard to scheduling and coordinating meetings, but in spite of it all, I keep moving forward. I often see this circumnavigation through my pseudo-professional world to be a preview of graduate school and the world beyond. If you think about it, we aren't often challenged in our younger age to balance everything. We follow standardized testing paths until we are eventually thrown out into the world, figuring out how everything works. That's why programs like McNair are golden to me, we're genuinely explained to about how things work and given honest recounts on the "easiness" of our fields and aspirations for on-going education. But all this begs the question, why are these programs as necessary for that as they are?

But, against it all...

My peers often utter the phrase "why didn't they teach us this in high school?" This is often said in regard to topics such as taxes, and domestic skills, but it's a good question. I think that something I've derived from this experience, is a furtherance of questioning that. Why didn't we learn this earlier? Adversity isn't an uncommon thing to face in life, but the thing we all share, that we all will face, is this.

Balancing ourselves when we load up on the responsibilities we've been mounting toward our entire lives. We aren't told to take a break when we need to. We aren't given a metric of how much we should be taking on. In all fairness, that's because it differs. Now, don't get me wrong. This isn't a long-winded way of complaining that I am nearing burnout or have overloaded myself. It's simply a discussion as to why were we taught to balance everything, or that anything else was more important than our profession?

Throwing it to the wind

However, even though I catch myself struggling with the why of a situation, mirroring that of the rest of my generation, I keep going. I'm unable to give myself the time to evaluate why we're all in this place. In ways I've found connections to my research.

I am looking into representation. I'm exploring the concept of mistreatment, and I can't help but ask; why am I, a twenty-year-old, BIPOC college student, attempting to provide that insight? Why didn't they teach us this in high school? I can only hope I can tell you in my findings.