Summer

The question that every college student is asked that isn't about post-graduation:

What are your summer plans?

How do you answer this? Sometimes people are lucky--they smile and say in a smooth, confident voice, "I'm interning for an incredibly famous company that you've probably heard of. If you haven't, it's most likely due to your lack of knowledge about the field that I will one day be wildly successful in. Don't worry too much about it though, because we all have our little foibles. How am I paying for this internship? I recently received a prestigious scholarship from an organization that has some famous academic in the title/have fabulously wealthy parents/saved up money from my three jobs that I worked at over the year."

And that's great! They worked for those honors, and don't think they didn't do more than their fair share of afterhours schmoozing and boozing. But I am not a girl who is entirely at home with careers planned out since birth. I don't run away to foreign countries at the drop of a hat, though I have been asked to and regretted it ever since I said no. I wish I could be that kind of person! But like most people, I'm awkwardly stuck in between, trying to balance between regrets and wants.

So what am I doing this summer?

I'm traveling to Seoul, Korea, the land of my ancestors. I've enrolled in a ten week program in Sogang University to study Korean five days a week. I will most likely be staying with my dad and his family, unless I can scrounge up the money to find a boarding house. I have no idea about the people I will meet or even the relative usefulness of acquiring this language. How is any of this going to reflect on my life after undergraduate?

I don't know about that either. I have vague ideas of applying to Liberty in North Korea's Korean-English translating internship next summer, but I don't even know if my interest in East Asia and the human rights crisis will hold out that long. I like to learn about Korea and want to write about soft power for my eventual thesis. But am I going to go to law school? Graduate school? Am I going to continue with post-college education at all? I'm not particularly academic, nor am I enormously gifted--is that really the right choice for me?

The motto of the story is: Cinderella knew what she wanted and went after it. She left the ball at midnight, creating just the right amount of mystery, and she cut off the heels and toes of the step-sisters who would have interfered. Not all of us are so lucky, nor do we have the drive. (Would I really permanently maim someone to get what I wanted?) I don't have a castle and handsome prince promised to me, but I don't know if I even want that after all. There's something to be said for climbing out the tower window before any fairy godmothers have the chance to show up.