In retrospect...

A lot of people say that college, especially the Ivy League schools, is like a black box. It does amazing things to your brain and transform you in a way that could not quite be comprehended.

I recently subscribed to the New Yorker and the New York Magazine. To my surprise, it is a lot more fun to read than I would have expected. It covers stories like "Gina Grant, a killer who got into Harvard." and "Mary had schizophrenia, then suddenly, she didn't."

It is interesting to see that outliers sometimes do get their way in Ivy League colleges. Maybe she is a serial killer. Maybe she is an orphan. Maybe she is a displaced refugee. Maybe she is human trafficked. Maybe she has schizophrenia, or worse, Fregoli syndrome and erotomania. Maybe she hates her own family and roots so much that she killed her parents to fake her way to a bank. Maybe she is a private banker who steals clients' money. Maybe she is a sociopath. Maybe she hires actors in her wedding to fake the daughter of a billionaire. To be worse, she may be all of the above.

Does it sound scary enough to you? It sounds like a thriller to me.

Even though a lot of people like to think of Columbia as like the worst Ivy or like the USC-kinda party school on the east coast, actually I have to say New York is a lot scarier than you can ever imagine.

Life at Columbia ain't easy. That's why we have three days off in a week. That's why we only have 12 hours of school in a week. That's why we have grade inflation. That's why school itself is not hard. It is the stress that you are living in a community where self driven competition has driven some to insanity.

In Chinese, we have a saying 工作不累，累的是要應付些精神病人.

Yes, I have to say I have seen the craziest people at Columbia.

But I have also seen the sanest and most supportive community if you choose to befriend with the right people.

Maybe I would kind of put my experience into words, so you can get a sense about what it means to be a New Yorker and why I am forever grateful for my Columbia experience.

I was a very rational person before I came to Columbia. My grades have always been good. I never failed any school exams. I was a prefect. I was a monitor. I was good at science, and I was also good at the humanities. I worked hard. I was a teacher's pet. I never broke any rules. I was not the valedictorian of my school. No, never. But I was always in the first 10% percentile. I was sometimes the 20th ranked student in my year, sometimes the 10th, which was pretty good. Not excellent. There was always room to be better.

My school had like point system for our internal grades, and music, arts and sports were not counted towards my overall grade. I think I constantly got a C in arts, music and sports, cos I thought they didn't matter. I didn't have piano at home. I never spent time learning music cos I thought it was a waste of money and time . I didn't know another language. I was taught Mandarin in school, so I practiced sometimes with my mother. She doesn't speak English. I was not very sporty either. I like arts, because it is very relaxing. But I am never good at drawing. Maybe I could have been an architect if I attend arts painting class every weekend back in the day. But I thought learning arts and making it into a career sounds too stressful and it may defeat its original purpose. I just took arts as something I do to release stress. I just simply enjoy arts, but I don't want to make my hobbie into a trained talent.

I always scored pretty high in the exams, without unbearable stress, and often with manageable hard work. The hardest thing that I have ever taken was SAT. It was really tough for me. So that makes me naturally inclined to enroll in engineering schools. I was never really a sympathetic person or a humanities material. But I do have to say my favorite subject in middle school was history. That's because I was in an all girls' school.

I was very money driven, like most Hong Kong people. I was goal oriented. I was very into learn earn return. Not neccessarily did I want to be a doctor, but at least I tried hard enough to go for the professor route. Or like lawyer. Or a lab researcher. Or like banker.

I wanted to get married. Like any other girls. With a Hong Kong guy. I believed that Hong Kong was a fair city, dynamic, international and full of opportunities. I was brainwashed just like any other Hong Kong people who read every issue of the tabloids and Apple Daily. I too needed some sort of entertainment news to stay informed. And most importantly, I read these magazines and newspaper to feel justified, to have a sense of purpose, and to feel that I am fortunate, through witnessing others' misfortunes. The Hong Kong media is known for being intrusive in discovering celebrities' private information and possibly mistakes in their actions and judgements.

I have to say that Columbia was almost the polar opposite at the very far end of that spectrum sitting across from Hong Kong. Columbia was nothing like Hong Kong. To my surprise, I didn't have that much of a culture shock and I didn't feel home sick at all. I stayed behind for summer school for my freshman year.

I thought an Ivy League school would be very nerdy with people all obsessed with grades, and academics. Actually, most of my peers at Columbia are very friendly, supportive, uncompetitive and understanding. I quickly fell in love with Columbia without much hesitation. Even though I have to say, my college admission process as an international student who had never even traveled to the east coast, was almost like a blind date or pre-arranged marriage. But it somehow worked out fine. I am very glad to have accepted Columbia's offer. In hindsight, I would still choose Columbia again if I could turn back time. And I am forever grateful that Columbia has chosen me to be part of their community.

I guess, I was just like my friends from Columbia. I lived with 10 other Asian girls in my year. They are pretty much the same group of friends from freshman year. They were all from public schools, just like me. And none of them was valedictorian in their class. My bestie Kelly was ranked about 60ish in Stuyvesant and same as her other friends who also lived with us on the same floor in junior and senior year.

My peers at Columbia were the least stressed people I have ever encountered in my life. They never bragged about anything. No bullying over NYU students, no bragging about the only Ivy in New York City. No throwing names. No entitlements. No mocking towards other races or other schools. We all have that assurance that we are doing just fine, without the need to prove or showcase our credentials. This is something that is very rare among my circle, especially the Ivy League and the east coast circle in Hong Kong.

Not only were my Columbia friends not stressed, they were also smarter and worked less hard than me. I think a friend of mine from Korea called me a power ranger. He said that I was always so energetic, with so much on my schedule. Slowly, through adapting to my life at Columbia, I have learned to slow myself down and stop comparing myself with others. I don't benchmark myself with my peers anymore. Also, Columbia has given me that assurance that I don't need to constantly prove my worthiness to gain recognition. Because that is not Columbia's culture.

My roommates and friends have all gone on to medical schools in Harvard, NYU, Australia, Yale, Columbia. It seems like I am the least accomplished in my peers. Yet, I think I am okay. If I was the past me twenty years ago, I would have worked very hard to prove them wrong.

What exactly happened that changed my mentality?

Let's go back to the start of this article.

What if I tell you that problematic girl, who is a serial killer, sociopath, criminal, refugee, fraud, imposter, human trafficked new immigrant, and schizophrenia patient, was my freshman roommate and she has identified me as a benchmarking target to justify her misfortunes as well as success?

What would you do?

How would you feel?

Tell me, cos I don't know any better.

You have all the rights to judge me, saying what a loser I have been since I graduated from Columbia. You can say that I have been too spoiled to be a stay at home daughter. But you know nothing about the trauma, stress and mental strain to co live with a person from prison and mental asylum combined.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/06/05/the-killer-who-got-into-harvard