Confessions of a Cat-holic (64)

After the average Joe graduated, he would also be a professional, such as an accountant or an engineer at Google, Apple or Oracle. Religiously speaking, he would be a devoted Christian with polite and gentleman manners, which I would call the gay vibes. The school molded the students that way. You really couldn't blame them for being a product in the system.

I only realized years after that I might have liked chemistry because it didn't involve much maths. I took a chemical engineering preprofessional elective at Columbia. It was the easiest class I had ever taken in my life given my age and academic standards at the time because all I needed to do was some elementary school level math problem sets. I even forgot to study for the midterm and took the test without any revision but I ended up with an A. Having said that, I had to say the other classes at Columbia were fairly difficult, especially the programming, engineering heavy matlab projects, simulation and physics. I actually hated maths a lot. I didn't know why I had to study it because I would never consider a career that had anything to do with numbers, such as actuary and accounting. Finance? Actually, in hindsight, I didn't know why I worked in wall street either. I picked sales instead of structuring, because I hated the daily work of structurers, such as generating term sheets and crunching numbers. Sales were relatively less "hard core" I reckoned. I took maths because I had to, not because I liked it. I could do it but I wouldn't want to make a living dealing with numbers all day long. I knew very early on that working took up more time than sleep and everything else combined and that we spent more time in office than at home, so why would I choose a life long career in something I felt uncomfortable with? I was not an idealistic person because I knew very well that passion and interests often might not pay and that we seldom ended up in a job which we liked. But I would not do a job I would hate just for the money, either.

Actually, my intended career was public relations. I wanted to work in an advertising agency like Ogilvy. I had a lot of friends from St Francis in event management organizing press conferences for celebrities and concert announcements. I thought that could be something I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I didn't know what major could get me in there so I thought a marketing or business major in a school like UPenn would be ideal for me. I only found out after graduation that actually a communications major was what I had been looking for but they didn't offer that in my college, nor in any of the other top schools I applied to. In Hong Kong, the major I would like to get in would be journalism in HKU or CUHK or communications in Baptist U. But my grades were too good for it. Nobody with 8As in HKCEE would get on that path. Trust me, I could get on the press for stories like that, just like that guy who gave up his accounting job to become a bus driver.

My cousin Ada went to UPenn as a graduate student in the architecture school. That could be my legacy. Therefore, for the longest time throughout my junior high and senior high, I thought I wanted to get into UPenn the most until I found out that they didn't even have a chemistry major. I was not sure whether I wanted to major in finance or business and I really wanted to give myself the second option of science research, given that I was pretty cautious after hearing Mr Maxim's story. I was quite pessimistic thinking that I would likely get unemployed in the job market as a foreigner so I thought the only way to secure and finance myself in the states would be a research staff in a lab or university. I was already a Canadian so getting a citizenship in the US was not my first priority but I wouldn't mind marrying an American, because I was worried that I could catch STDs from the brothel-loving perverts in Hong Kong. I actually secretly fell in love with David Schwimmer after watching the American Pie. I could see myself marrying him.