The view from Korea’s Haeinsa Temple taken July 2023, Photo Credit: Ardaschir Arguelles
Even as a senior, I am still mildly surprised when – in January, in the thick of winter – my peers begin to talk about their applications for various summer programs. My bemusement betrays a basic thickheadedness on my part, an inability to learn from the unproductive summers of years before. My freshman year was the year of COVID, when all classes were virtual, and since online summer classes were being offered at no extra cost, it made sense to stay where I was in Minnesota and fill my summer that way. I hardly felt that I was “at Columbia,” and had no sense of the opportunities – jobs, internships, research – open to me. While taking Calculus III and Intermediate Latin from home, I looked forward to the fall, when my time at Columbia (I told myself) would start in earnest.
In a sense it did, that fall of 2021. I joined clubs; I made friends; I went to classes in person. But come spring, I still had no sense of what to do in terms of actually applying for internships and other opportunities. Some of my friends were applying for research through opportunities like Columbia’s Humanities Research Scholars program; others were finding work and internship opportunities all around the country. I, meanwhile, somehow failed to process that all of this was going on, and by the time the spring semester drew to a close, found that most application deadlines had passed. It was back to Minnesota for me that summer. I told myself that it would be restful to be back home. It was – for about a month. After that, the stir-craziness began to set in. The summer was still worthwhile – I found a play-writing workshop in a nearby town and got to see a piece of mine performed on stage – but what got to me was the lack of intentionality. Certainly it was wonderful to spend three months with family, but the problem was that I hadn’t quite chosen to do so, and I wanted to do something more.
So, going into my junior year, I was determined I would be ready. I would look ahead early, and know what I was doing, and the next summer would be excellent. Admittedly, I didn’t know what exactly I would apply for. My goal was to go into academia, and so some internships and job opportunities weren’t immediately relevant. What helped was that in my junior fall I declared a double-major in East Asian Languages and Cultures. The EALAC major requires a minimum of three years of training in some East Asian language, and I only had two years of college left. Thankfully, having some Korean background, I was able to join the Accelerated Korean for Heritage Speakers sequence, which completes the equivalent of two years of Korean in two semesters – but this still left me with two semesters of a language class to take my senior year, not to mention any other remaining requirements.
I decided this wasn’t ideal, and that my goal for the summer would be to travel to Korea and complete an intensive language program there. This plan would stretch my conversational abilities and let me place into a higher level of Korean. I started making plans for this toward the end of fall semester, when my Korean teacher told me about a few opportunities I might apply for – one of them the Critical Language Scholarship (CLS), funded by the Department of State, and another a scholarship funded by the EALAC department. Things were becoming concrete: I put in my CLS application, which had a fall deadline (the application for the EALAC opportunity opened in the spring), and then I looked ahead to the next semester.
To be frank, as I went into the spring, my eggs were mostly in one basket, my hopes riding on my plan to go to Korea. I learned in January that I had not in fact received the CLS, but this was not too much of a blow – the CLS is competitive, and I told myself I had a better shot at the EALAC funding. I did look around for different funding opportunities, applying on a whim to another, funded by Columbia’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute, before applying to the EALAC department grant. From then on, I told myself, it was a waiting game.
The monotony of waiting was interrupted when, while at a rugby tournament in Virginia, I managed to tear my ACL. Thankfully, I didn’t tear anything else, and I was soon back on my feet. But after some weeks of prehab, it was decided that reconstructive surgery would be the best course of action, and that the best time for that would be at the very start of the summer. What this would do to my travel plans, I didn’t know – but those plans still hinged on receiving funding for travel and tuition. And when, in late March, I heard that I hadn’t received the EALAC departmental funding either, that stopped me in my tracks. My plan for Korea was gone – and, like in the years before, most of the applications for other opportunities had closed. I was stuck, and with a bad knee to boot.
My ringing disappointment at this fact set me adrift – adrift enough, in fact, that I washed up at the LG sales headquarters in New Jersey with several other EALAC students, listening to salespeople give pitches for their products and hoping for a potential internship. I discovered in myself a nascent passion for household appliances. It wouldn’t be the worst summer, I decided way, to hawk a dishwasher with a sub 60-minute cycle and efficient drying capabilities, or the refrigerators with built-in speakers whose colors changed to the beat of the music. I was entertaining such thoughts on the bus back from New Jersey when I checked my email, and found that I had received funding from the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, coming out to an amount larger than I would have received even from the EALAC department proper.
Though this was a wonderful opportunity, I wasn’t sure I could take it up. I had to consider my knee surgery. Besides, the program guaranteed me funding, but not a place in any particular program at a Korean university – and most of the major summer programs in Seoul had already closed their applications.
These obstacles began to clear, but not all smoothly. My doctor, seeing that I was walking stably, gave me the all clear to postpone my surgery until the end of the summer. My mother helped me track down a summer program still accepting applications, but this program demanded apostille verification of most of my documents, down to my transcript – a process that usually takes several weeks, and it was already early May. Toward the end of the semester, I hurried down to the New York Department of State and was told there was no way to accelerate my application. I stood in the waiting area trying to figure out what to do, scrolling unhelpfully through reviews of other programs, all of which (I assumed) were closed. On a whim, I clicked on Sogang University’s summer program, which was more conversation-focused (so I had heard) and thus certainly what I wanted – and then I saw that not only had they extended their application deadline, but that they did not require any of the bureaucratic rigmarole for document verification. I walked out of the building feeling a good deal lighter. Providentially, things had fallen into place.
That, in short, is how I ended up in South Korea this summer, visiting family, studying the language, and eating plenty of naengmyeon – a formative experience not only in terms of the language study, but also in terms of my vision for my future career. I hardly hold up my experience in this case as a model. My trip to Korea was an unlikely thing, born out of last-minute scrapes and many answered prayers. To anyone who wants to avoid those twists and turns, I would certainly recommend casting a wider net and applying to more opportunities. But to anyone who feels disheartened, or unsure where to start with finding opportunities for the summer, I hope my story can serve as a model of what can happen even if you don’t quite know what you’re doing – that, even if everything seems lost, you never know what doors might end up open to you.