Patricia
Class of 2022, studying at University of California, Davis
I had been a slow adapter since I was a child, and after I came to SCIE with great joy, I can’t help but doubt myself for a long time. I felt that I could not do anything here, and I was not good at anything other than studying, and even making friends became difficult. In the first semester, I was afraid of being alone, so I was eager to make friends, and I wanted to learn a lot of skills right away, but then ended up wasting a lot of time on things that I couldn’t and shouldn’t do in a hurry. My first semester was rather confusing, and I didn’t have any goals, nor know what I could do in the future. Fortunately, I participated in a Chinese language field trip during winter break, and unexpectedly I made good friends that accompanied me for the whole four years of SCIE there.
After the first semester, I felt that everything was slowly getting on track and I was getting used to the pace of my high school life. After I settled into the school environment, I slowly made a few friends. Also, I was not as eager as I was at the beginning to learn everything because I realized that I could still have a happy high school life even if I was not that versatile or sporty.
The next more important point in my memory is the two years in AL, which also were the application seasons. In A1, I made lots of preparations for application, but unfortunately, I didn’t get very good results, so this led me to be in a bad mood in A1A2, especially when I couldn’t get the TOEFL score I aimed in A1, and again I often doubted myself. At the beginning of A2, I got achieved a satisfying TOEFL score , and then I started to follow the teacher’s instructions to write the documents and prepare the activity list. At that time I thought everything was getting better. Yet I realized that the more pressure I got, the more tears I shed during those months of the application season; I lost a lot of sleep, and I doubted many times whether the decisions I made were right or not, especially after I decided on the school list and submitted the paperwork. I consistently worried that I made the wrong choice.
Luckily, those two years were also my best years in high school. During these time, my friends, teachers, and family gave me a lot of support, so I had a lot of happy and memorable moments during the painful days. I got offers from universities I liked. After I got the offers, I thought back on these two years and realized that I could have done better in many cases, such as spending more time on my studies and trying some new things sometimes.
In September, I went off to college. This time I was just as excited as the last time, but I adapted to college much better than in high school because of my years of experience in high school. The fast pace of my studies at SCIE made it possible for me to keep up with my classes in college, and the fact that I was always alone during application season made me less afraid of being alone than I was four years ago. Now I also had friends from SCIE who can chat with me when I was sad. Trying new things in college, keeping in touch with my old friends, and going to classes alone are all things that I wanted to do before but was afraid to do; now I can finally start to make up for my high school regrets.
At the end of the day, in my four years of high school, I learned to be brave, to accept myself as an ordinary person and to reconcile with myself, to be lucky enough to receive a lot of love and help, and then to discover that people being loved by were all not ordinary.
