I’d like to say that ending college is like falling into Picasso’s painting “The Actor” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art: a sad ending to a beautiful masterpiece, minus the punch holes.
As to the public shock, it’s more of an overwhelming sigh of relief from my parents of “She somehow survived.”
If the aforementioned analogy was too obscure, presumptuous or avant-garde, however, I’ll settle with the bird-leaving-the-nest metaphor.
I started UCLA fresh out of the Orange County High School of the Arts where I studied musical theater with an acting emphasis and was an over-achieving academic leader.
After leaving the arts to pursue a higher education, which I thought meant academics-only, I found myself a first-year political science student on the international relations route. By the summer of my third year I realized I wasn’t getting what I wanted and made the jump to the global studies major.
Three quarters into my fourth year, the major which I’d entertained from the start (French), became a double.
I kept listening to my mother’s doubt against my decision ““ “What are you going to do with a French major?!” ““ and it’s only after four years of college that I’ve learned to listen to myself and to just do it.
My palate often changes, ranging from arts to academia. I thought that I could somehow defy one side, accepting traditional academics and forgetting my creative whims, but clearly that has failed.
I’ve learned to appease both my right and left brain hemispheres and have a 50-page thesis on “Le Graffiti Français,” combining my love of art and culture with scholastic depth, to show for it.
I followed my crazy little heart, as my diverse UCLA transcript shows.
I have broken many academic taboos, taken many more than the limit of “classes you are allowed to take” and gone so far as to enroll in a major-restricted theater class for graduating seniors ““ as a sophomore.
Call it foolishness or my naughty desire to fit everything onto my plate, but I’ve learned invaluable lessons from my cornucopia of UCLA involvements, such as how to perfect the arts of communication and time management.
After graduating I plan to keep up my career as an artist and actor, adamant to follow my passions. I’ll be working at The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and playing with my main stage improv teams at The Improv Space, iO West and Jon Lovitz’s Universal City improvisation theaters in the meanwhile.
My advice to continuing Bruins is to take the classes you want to take; to befriend the guy you’ve secretly dubbed “The One”; to meet up with an old teaching assistant for drinks in a foreign country; to get to know your favorite professor, his wife and dog; and to buy a parking permit for the last quarter of your last year because senioritis bites.
Follow your path, whatever it may be and “Say Yes,” an improv philosophy I live by that will help you with your decisions.
Lastly, don’t forget to break rules, and say “no” when need be (e.g. to an unhappily married 30-year-old French man who is attempting to woo you with his shoes and watch.)
Do what I did: Throw the shoe and the watch away, get your friends to form a human shield around you, and then after the fiasco is over, laugh at the beautiful absurdity and wonder of our lives.
Wong was an A&E contributor from 2007-2010 and a Daily Bruin TV contributor from 2007-2009.