Reflections and Images

 During winter break, my mom asked me this deep question about whether motivation can be cultivated using external factors or motivation primarily depends on one's inner drive. The reason my mom asked me this is that a lot of Asian moms in the local community wanted to know how my mom raised me after they learned that I got into MIT (don't want to sound pretentious or anything).  To answer my mom, I started to think about why I started to care about school and academics. I would say that my attitude towards academics became more serious when I was in 4th grade, which sounds a bit too early. I attended a bilingual school in Taiwan, and technically my school was part of Taiwan's public school system. As a result, there was a lot of eastern influence in my bilingual school. For instance, our school had awards for the top 3 students of each class ever since 3rd grade, and the school culture emphasized hard work from a young age. While I had time to play with my friends, I would...

During MLK Jr. Day weekend, I interviewed my friend for StoryCorps. StoryCorps is a nonprofit organization that encourages people to interview others that they are close with such as family members or close friends. This was my first time doing the StoryCorps interview and I was excited.  The questions I chose for my friend were not personal, but I still considered the questions to be deep. As I went through the questions, I learned a lot about the struggles and challenges that my friend experienced. I think this process made me even closer to her. I found it satisfying to finally have the questions I had for many years answered during the interview. These were questions that I always wanted to ask, but I didn't ask them because I either kept putting it off or I forgot to ask. My personalized questions included why my friend persisted with music for so many years and what my friend learned from living in foreign countries.  While the answers I got weren't what I expected, I st...