The Road Ahead

"Her journey has transformed her so thoroughly that she no longer fits in easily. Her change in status has left Ms. Justice a little off balance, seeing the world from two vantage points at the same time: the one she grew up in and the one she occupies now." -Class Matters: Up From the Holler

After being at Harvard for two years, I sometimes feel disconnected from the place that I call home. At times, I find myself different from the person I once was, a little less silly, a little more attune with the political correctness of things around me, a bit more mature. I feel as though I'm at a point of my life where I feel that I either have to embrace the skills and ways of life I have developed since my stay at Harvard, or to completely ignore it and go back to where I came from. Although, as previously mentioned, I do not always feel comfortable with life at Harvard, I do feel a need to allow myself the chance to become the individual I came here for. But another part of me, finds it hard to let go of the girl I once was, the person I was before coming to Harvard. I once vowed that I will never let Harvard change me, but in a way I feel that I have changed.

Do I want to go back to being that girl who barely ever spoke in proper grammar around her friends, back to a class status that I was born into, or choose a different path for myself? I chose Harvard for a reason, yet letting go of who I once was is much harder. My college experience will always be different from those of friend's back home. Most of my friends chose to go to state schools, some chose to drop out, but no matter what, their exposure to this world of class is completely different from that of mine. They will never experience that sense of elitism and exclusivity that comes along with the prestige of the Harvard name. Similar to Ms. Justice from the article, I too, can see "the world from two vantage points at the same time." But unlike her, I have to choose which path to go on with.

Recruiters on Campus!

With the start of recruiting season for summer internships for Juniors, the words "connections" and "networking" have been thrown around so often that I think the two year olds in Leverett D-hall know how to say it. There is something about those two words that I greatly dislike. I don't like the idea of having to talk someone up, and acting like one is interested in something that they're clearly not into, to get a job. This type of attitude and life style was just something else that I was completely foreign to and had to adapt to.

Where I come from, being the realest a person can be is being the best a person can be. No one likes it when "anyone puts on airs" or "tries to 'rise above' their station" (Lecture 12: The Working Class). It is highly looked down upon to try to act like what someone is not. As mentioned in Lecture 14: Crossing Class Boundaries, "Lower income students talked about character traits as class advantages," they include:

• Hard work
• Appreciation
• Self-reliance
• Frugality

In lower class culture, it is believed that one should not rely on others for opportunities, that one should always work their hardest to get where they can instead of "shining another person's shoes" as in a Chinese saying. Yet, at Harvard this is the type of attitude one should use to secure a future in the career of their choice. This attitude and culture is just something that I do not necessarily approve of, but have come to accept as a way of life.

Fast Food for Everyone!

In conjunction with Soc 155, I'm also taking a class on Social Inequality in Health Care, Soc 166. Of all the topics that interested me the most from this class, it was the issue of obesity. In America, areas of extensive poverty often times have a high rate of obesity and other health issues. This is due to the fact that people from lower classes can only afford to eat food that is cheap and comes in large quantities, aka junk food.

In higher class societies, there is often more of a need to be skinny whereas in lower class neighborhoods body image does not seem to be a big issue. I began to notice this issue first when I was in a summer program at a college in Massachusetts my junior year of high school. In this particular discussion we focused on body image issues that affect young girls of present day America. My fellow classmates had a lot to contribute. They were mostly from predominately affluent neighborhoods, and talked about the need to be skinny where they are from. They feel a pressure to order salads with no dressing, drink nothing but water, and exercise so much so that they're legs do not touch. I commented on how this was not an issue we have where I come from. No one was ever pressured to be skinny, at least not to my knowledge.

In Oakland, basically around every corner, I can find a McDonald, which would always be across the street from Burger Kings, and then at the side street there would be a KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken). The abundance of fast food restaurants that was available to choose from was sometimes overwhelming, it made making a decision on which type of greasy, unhealthy food to buy, extremely hard. Eating healthy certainly is not the first thing in anyone's mind when there is so much cheap yet filling food to choose from to feed one's family. It makes sense that obesity and other health problems affect areas of lower class people.

Another thing is, although I understand it's better not to eat such unhealthy food, I also think that McDonalds and all those other fast food restaurants taste better than some healthier options. If it is more filling and tastier, then why not eat it? As is mentioned in Lecture 18: Accounting for Taste, "the realities of economic necessity means that tastes of LCCs are organized around that which is functional or practical—the "taste for necessity."

Welcome on Board...

Because of an unprecedented family emergency near Thanksgiving, I had to change my initial plans of staying at Harvard for the break and had to find last minute tickets to fly home. If it were not for an emergency, I would never buy tickets so close to the actual flight date. I usually start looking for tickets months in advance, hoping to notice trends in the sale of tickets so I can buy the cheapest ones possible. It is so hard going to school so far away from home, because of my financial status, it's not possible for me to just fly home if problems occurred. It is just extremely inconvenient.

Because of my need to find the cheapest ticket possible, I have to sometimes connect three different flights and fly for ten or more hours in the air when it should only take, at most, six hours to fly from Boston to Oakland. To me it is more important to save $50 instead of spending that extra money to fly home as soon as possible. I was once talking to a friend who is from a pretty affluent background and he told me that time is so much more important to him. He said that he thinks that it's ridiculous I'm willing to waste so much time to save only $50. Yet to me, $50 can buy around 10 meals at McDonald's. It can feed so many more people than what saving a little time can do. I guess these are simply my lower class tendencies.

People of upper class statuses try to maximize their time whereas people from lower class backgrounds try to maximize their money. Due to the fact that people from a higher social class don't need to worry about money since they have enough that they can feed a couple of generations even if they don't do anything. Yet, they do not understand how important every single penny saved can be to a poor family.

I Got Style

A distinctive indication of class status that I have noticed is the difference in the choice of color in clothing that the upper and the lower class wear. People of the upper class status are more prone to wearing clothing of neutral colors, such as gray, black, and navy. Individuals among the lower class status, however, are more into wearing clothes of bright colors, such as bright green, pink, purple, etc. In the urban city that I grew up in, a lot of people often wore the brightest, boldest, colors, matching from head to toe in from earrings to shoes. In a more elitist society, such as Harvard, however, people tend to dress in a more reserved way.

In class we learned that the old money class tries their best not to draw attention upon themselves. They do not want to wear things that scream out "rich" to other people. According to Class Matters, "Inherited wealth smoothed the rough edges, their descendants morphed into American high society and evolved a signature style of living based on understatement and old-fashioned patrician values," "Showing off money was a sin," and "Wealthy people dressed down" (2-3). Individuals from the old money upper class social status feels a need to blend themselves into the background so that they do not get called out for being rich and wealthy. They find a need to hide their wealthy and not flaunt it. Individuals from the lower class, however, try their best to be noticed. They tend to wear a lot of bright and loud colored clothing, huge hoops, and match from head to toe. The way they dress tend to draw attention to themselves. The difference in style and clothing between the upper and lower class is indeed an interesting one.

When hope is not enough

As I read How to Raise a Hopeful Child, I couldn't help but think that the article was targeted towards people of a certain class status. From driving three hours to visit an art exhibition, to taking time off from work simply to spend time with a child, these are all activities that a middle class and upper class family can take on, but definitely not the lower or working class.

The article is simply saying that in order to have a hopeful child, you have to be able to give them the attention and time they need. This is not something everyone can do, this is certainly not something the lower class community can do. A lot of people in the lower class community have to work long hours in order to support their family, if this time were taken away so that they can help their children be hopeful, then they will not have a source of income. When there is no money coming into the family, then they will not be able to afford the basic needs a person should have.

The idea of raising a hopeful child is a beautiful one, but not everyone is able to spend quality time with their kids all the time. The assumption that simply everyone can do the same things to raise a positive child is a foolish one.

The Cost of Education

"But class is still a powerful force in American life. Over the past three decades, it has come to play a greater, not lesser, role in important ways. At a time when education matters more than ever, success in school remains linked tightly to class." - Shadowy Lines that Still Divide

This statement from a New York Times article reflects the structure of class in America's current society. Education has become one of the biggest indicators of future success. Yet it is something only people of middle and upper classes desire. Individuals from working classes are stuck in a seemingly endless cycle that ends with them being stuck in the working class. Those who are rich and wealthy are able to send their kids to private schools instead of the public school system. These kids are prematurely exposed to the importance of obtaining a college education at a young age whereas the kids from lower class communities do not.

Often times, people from the lower class community attend a school that does not help them prepare for their future and does not care at all in the students' learning. Some of these kids graduate high school at a fifth grade reading level. Students from the lower class status are not exposed to the same opportunities that more affluent kids are exposed to. These kids do not know about internships or summer opportunities that can help them get into a good college that will help them move upwards in the social ladder. In the lecture regarding the "culture of poverty" thesis, it is believed that culture is passed on to the next generation, and so will these ideas that school is not important. But with the importance of obtaining a college degree and above to get a good job, lower class individual's inability to do well in school will result in them not going to college and in the end, not getting a good job. This is why the "culture of poverty" thesis exists.

An Ivy League Education

"At these schools lower class students are a distinct minority and, in some cases, an invisible one" ... “The working-class student feel pressured not to differentiate him or herself, but to conform to a middle-class academic norm by observing, quietly, both in the classroom and socially, to avoid revealing a lack of academic preparation or awkward details of a personal nature” (DiMaria 62 & 63).

Before taking Soc 155: Class and Culture, discrimination to me was simply based on race and skin color. I never really thought of the idea of discrimination against an entire class of people. For me this was easy to assume because of the fact that a lot of the people I grew up with and went to the same schools with were from the same class. I felt blinded by the fact that there was so much homogeneity in my previous social space that I could not see the inequality which affected my community in comparison to the rest of America. The riches that I have encountered since the start of my college career at Harvard has been beyond my imagination. This type of class and status inequality has opened my eyes to an entire new world of discrimination.

Coming to college, it was overwhelming to be exposed to so many different cultures from all over America and the world. However, because of the people that I had initially surrounded myself with, I thought that my inability to relate with others was due to my own ethnic cultural roots than an effect of class. After meeting other individuals later on who were from the same class status but of different ethnic groups and from different parts of America, I started to realize that it was more than a race issue, that this inequality was more due to the fact that we were from a lower class background. I could relate to these individuals better and we faced similar struggles at an institution like Harvard. As one of the best schools in the world, the focus on middle and upper class culture was even more apparent. As DiMaria said, " she argued that attending to the special circumstances of lower- class students brings to the fore the many ways in which the nation's diversity rhetoric continues to gloss over certain forms of cultural difference, and continues, in an unreflective manner, to advance the middle-class ideology of the academy as the normative one" (62).

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air

Recently I've started watching The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. For those who don't know, it's a popular show from the 90's about an African American teenager who lived in a bad neighborhood in Philadelphia, and his move to Bel-Air. Along the way, because of clashes between culture of a lower class and upper class, many funny situations occur.

In a particular episode, Will's mom visits the family in Bel Air for Thanksgiving from that the audience can see that her views from a lower class status are pretty different than that of her sister's upper class status ones. Whereas Will's mom believed that Will should be doing chores in the house instead of relying on the servants, Will's aunt believes that education is more important and that instead of doing house work, she believes that the kids should be spending that time on homework. There is an obvious class divide between the two women's perspectives regarding the importance of education, simply because they live in different class settings.

As mentioned in the lecture regarding Crossing Class Boundaries, lower income individual appreciate hard work and self reliance more, this explains why Will's mother wanted him to do chores by himself. She believed that it built character. Whereas Will's aunt believed that homework was more important because it will help Will with his future which will bring him to better opportunities in the future. These different ideas of what is important and should be prioritized is different according to class.

Working in a Cafe

As I am writing these blog entries, I am sitting in Cafe Pamplona, enjoying the company of random strangers and just plain observing the way others behave. I love people watching.

Looking around, I notice several tables where people have left their personal belongings to go do other things outside of the cafe. Things left behind include books, purses, wallets, laptops, etc; this really surprises me. I can never understand how people are able to just leave personal items unguarded at a random store to go do other stuff. Aren't they afraid that people might steal this belongings? Where does this enormous amount of trust come from?

Where I come from, people can barely leave their belongings at home without being worried about it being stolen. I'm constantly hearing about friends' having their houses broken into. In one extreme instance, a friend's laptop was stolen and sold at a nearby flea market. She happened by there one day and found her own laptop for sale. The fact that people here can leave for hours with their stuff just sitting on a table with random strangers is beyond me. I don't know if I can ever develop that much trust in people. I've learned to be extremely guarded about my stuff and the actions of fellow classmates have often surprised. This is another obvious case of habitus.

Class and Music

The last day of section started with the mention of music and class. We were asked to what extent is music particularly salient to class distinction? Bryson said, "Music is one type of cue that can be used to construct symbolic boundaries between groups and individuals" (886).

Ironically later that night was Leverett House Formal at the Top of the Hub and I was forced to face my personal taste of music that directly related to my own class status. After hearing the exciting news of having our winter dance at one of the best places in Boston with the beautiful view skyline of this place I now call home, I could not wait to dress up with all my friends and dance the night away. I had envisioned a night of endless fun that would be forever etched in my memories. Indeed, I will probably never forget this night.

The second we stepped into the second to the top floor of the Prudential Center, we could hear a live band playing all types of jazz music. I started talking to my friends and told them how I could not dance to this type of music, that I did not know how to dance to this type of music. Oakland is a place known for the start of the hyphy movement and this was definitely not the type of music I was accustomed to. Growing up, I listened predominately to hip hop and r&b music, jazz was something that was never well-liked within my own group of friends and something I generally try to avoid when possible. Upon finding out that this was the only music playing for the entire night, with no stop in it, my initial great mood for the formal was ruined. My inability to enjoy myself because of this music bothered me. Some of the closest friends I came to the formal with had similar complaints, "I can't dance to this type of music!" After staying for an hour, we all finally decided to leave. As the section slide mentioned: "It turns out that it is not high status people, but low status people has the least level of musical tolerance," boy was that true.

Class starts young

Ever since I started tutoring with an after school program through PBHA I've started to realize that the traits associated with class starts at a young age. The kids that I teach are elementary school students who all live in the same lower class neighborhood neighborhood. Their attitude, the way they talk, and the way they dress screams lower class. At such a young age, where did this class culture develop from? The obvious answer is none other than their own family.

As Bourdieu's idea of habitus goes, "Habitus is a 'structured structure' that derives from class specific experiences of socialization in family and peer groups" (Swartz 102). It is hard to break out of these habitus that one is surrounded by growing up. The chances of these kids breaking their habits and changing the way they talk after years of exposure to slang and a lower class culture, it is most likely impossible for them to act otherwise. Habitus is resistant to change, so does this mean that these kids are destined for a future in the lower end of the social ladder? Hopefully, things will one day change for these kids and they will meet someone or some circumstance that will help them break their habitus. Although it is resistant to change, it does not mean that it won't happen.

Too Many Cliques

I’ve decided that I want to do more social service and community work this year at Harvard. I’m prepared to join a mentoring program at PBHA and teach kids who are in elementary school. There is something about the innocence of childhood that puts me at peace. They don’t have to worry about jobs, or grades, or class statuses. Whether they are of the same social class or not, same race or not, it doesn’t matter to them, they still play with each other.

At Harvard there is something about class and culture. There are just way too many cliques here. Sitting in the dining hall during lunch or dinner is the best time to people watch and observe the crowd that congregates. There are often times a table of athletes, a table of Asians, a table of black people, and just a lot of other tables of homogeneity. I’ve realized that at Harvard, a majority of cliques are formed through sport teams, ethnic groups, and social classes. It is hard not to spend all your time with people you see all the time. The moment we step into Harvard, we are bombarded with information about the different groups that we can join according to our skin color and interest. Then there are the final clubs that seem to add even more to the homogeneity that already exists within friend groups. Why can’t we have a “Mixed Ethnics Group?” Ok, maybe not something with a name like that, but just a group where we welcome diversity? I understand that it is often times hard to relate to one another, but I just don’t feel the effort being made either. Maybe I just over analyzed this issue of race and social classes and it actually isn’t as big of a deal as I make it. For me, joining some type of PBHA program will give me a chance to venture out of this, as we Harvard kids call it, the well known Harvard bubble.

Cultural Capital

I just got back from a meeting for Women In Business for a mini track called “InFocus: Consulting.” Consulting is something that I’ve heard being thrown into conversations here and there. But besides people talking about it here, I’ve never heard of it elsewhere. Maybe I’ve just been in my Oakland bubble for too long and was extremely ignorant as a kid in grade school. Anyways, point is, I heard that a lot of Harvard students graduate from here and go into consulting for a couple of years, it just wouldn’t hurt to learn a bit about it. Since consulting was a job that I might want to hold in the future, I was extremely curious to learn what it was about and how it worked, so I decided to go to that meeting.

Sometimes I wish I knew what consulting was before I came to Harvard. The job sounds like a pretty fun one but sometimes I feel as if I’m not on the right track to obtaining it for my future. If I had known earlier what it was about and realized what I now know, I would have joined different extracurricular activities, minored in a different concentration, and just done some things differently. But now that I’m a junior in college, it just feels like it’s a little too late to start.

As mentioned in Lecture 16: Cultural Capital and Class Reproduction, cultural capital is "general cultural background, knowledge, skills, and dispositions that are passed from one generation to the next." Where I come from, no one I knew worked as a consultant. Because of this, the knowledge of such jobs did not translate into my cultural background. This is absolutely an indicator of class difference. Most people I knew worked blue-collar jobs and did manual labor. Therefore, these were the only jobs, that I really had exposure to. If I were exposed to this culture at an earlier age, I wonder if things would have been different. With recruiting events coming up, I hope I will be prepared in time.

Real Estate, Baby!

I attended a meeting for Veritas Financial Group for the Real Estate Track last week that made me once again, ponder about class and money. There were ten of us in the room and we were introducing ourselves and talking about the type of experience we had with real estate. I was the last one to go and got to hear about everyone’s experience in that area first. Of the ten people in the room, nine of them had experience with real estate because their family is either in the business or owns some property. This scared me and I was afraid to say that my only experience in real estate was when we touched over it very briefly in the introductory track for the program, Financial Universe, but what else could I say, right?

As the first kid in the house to go to college, my parents expect for me to be the first one in the family to buy her own house. We were never able to buy our own house because my parents never made that much money from the jobs they held. My dad was a chef in a restaurant, now he’s retired, and my mom was a seamstress at basically a sweatshop. Because of their limited ability to speak English, they were never able to get better paying jobs. My mom actually even got underpaid for all the time that she spent sewing clothes together. Friends from home who had parents also with a limited ability to speak English had the same exact experience. Their parents either worked in restaurants or worked in other places that only spoke Chinese. Owning property was sort of a far reach for some of us. Anyways, that meeting sure made me extremely self aware and class conscious. At a school that seems to be all about networking, it just felt weird to admit that I don't have that type of familial connections.

Living it Large

Watching the documentary “Born Rich” exposed me to another side of American lives that I never knew about. I used to think that worlds like that of Gossip Girl didn’t really exist. Who is able to have balls in the middle of the year for no reason? Who actually holds galas that only people with invitation can get into? I have never thought of myself as ever becoming that type of person, and have never met any one of those class statuses, especially before coming to Harvard.

Home is 3000 miles away in Oakland, CA. The culture here and the culture there is absolutely different. Maybe I have just been surrounded by the same type of people for too long, but I used to pride myself for having friends of every different race and thought that my social group at home was pretty much the opposite of homogenous. Coming to Harvard proved me wrong. All my friends back home listened to the same type of music, dressed pretty much the same way, and basically had the same type of favorite everything. Ranging from restaurants to stores to shop from to places to hang out. It was not that hard to relate to one another.

Our lives were definitely not as adventurous as those of the kids from “Born Rich.” At most for a friend’s birthday, there was a party at someone’s house, or if one can fork over a huge sum of money, then at a hotel room. But that was the basis of our parties. We never dressed up to go to these parties, the most dressed up we got was to go clubbing. Watching the documentary was somehow like watching a foreign alien on another planet, it was unrealistic in my head. Even my close group of friends at Harvard range from lower class, to working class, to lower middle class. My freshman roommate was from New York City and she was able to fly whenever she wanted to visit her boyfriend and went home every other weekend. Her extravagant lifestyle differed greatly from mine and we never hung out in the same crowd. It saddens me that I cannot be closer friends with people who are from a different social status as me.

Our Groups of Friends

Over lunch, my friend and I started talking about our group of friends. I told her about how sometimes I cannot relate to one of my other roommates from last year and it saddened me that we were not able to get as close as I wanted us to. We both saw each other as extremely good friends and tell each other all types of secrets. However, we found it hard to relate to one another outside of things such as boys and clothes, we didn’t have very similar tastes in things.

As Professor Nelson mentioned in lecture one day, our culture is completely made of our upbringing. People of the same social status often times have similar tastes in things. Maybe this was the problem with my roommate and I. She liked light rock music and I liked hip-hop and R&B. I love to wear bright colors and never cared about brand name but she only shopped for clothes from Neiman Marcus. She came from an all girls private school and I came from a coed public school.

Our very obvious dissimilar tastes in life make it hard for us to communicate about things outside of the happenings of our daily lives. As I enter my third year at Harvard, I’m hoping that maybe we can both expose ourselves to things that each other like and gradually become the best of friends. Maybe we will go beyond the stereotype of those kids in Elmstown’s Youth.

Chinatowns

I went out to Chinatown today at the spur of the moment. As I was walking around I was reminded of all the similarities of the Boston Chinatown to the Oakland Chinatown. Everything just made me think of home. I overheard someone speaking in Taishanese. That made me extremely happy because I am of Taishanese heritage. A lot of the other Chinese people I have encountered at Harvard speak Mandarin whereas I speak a pretty different dialect, Cantonese.

I was having a dinner conversation with a friend the other day, and I discovered that she was of Cantonese heritage as well. We were pretty happy to find that out about one another, as this is a rare find at a place like Harvard. This actually got me wondering why there are so few Chinese people at Harvard who speak Cantonese, it wasn’t as though there weren’t any Chinese people around. My friend and I had a discussion and we thought maybe this has to do with class status. A lot of the Chinese people who speak mandarin here have parents who have jobs of middle class status, whereas a lot of Cantonese speakers are from lower to lower middle class status.

This might have to do with the fact that the southern region of China who had more Cantonese speakers tend to immigrate because of poverty where as the northern region of China, which had more mandarin speakers, immigrated because they wanted better lives than the ones they already lead in China. Because of this, the northern Chinese lead better lives when they come to America and are more able to provide a better education for their children. This in turn leads to them attending wonderful Ivy League or above the average universities and colleges. The southern Chinese lead lives as immigrants in the lower class status and a majority are not able to provide a better education for their children besides the free, public ones that are available in their neighborhood. This class difference that existed in China follows them as they immigrate to another country. For these Chinese people, their only hope and dream are for their American born children to obtain the most they can out of their free education and become successful one day.

Top Models!

While reading a previous issue of Vogue, I flipped to an article featuring Gisele Bundchen. The article was talking about how she just had a baby and was trying to remove herself from the entertainment business for a while to rest. She talked about how every once in a while she would travel with her baby and her husband to a jungle in Brazil and live there for a while. As I was reading this, I thought to myself, honestly how many people are able to say that they need a break from life and just escape to a beautiful house in the middle of no where?

Obviously this is a very distinctive example of the difference between classes. The fact that Gisele has enough money to build a house in the middle of a jungle tells us that she is capable of doing what most people cannot. The fact that she is able to just leave her job and not go to work for a couple of weeks tells me that she’s someone who does not have to worry about money. Growing up in a working class family, there has never been a day where my parents did not have to work to support us. When I was little, I remember wanting to go shopping on a Sunday but my parents told me that we couldn’t because they had to work that weekend. Besides the fact that my mom cannot find a job because of the economy right now, I do not remember another time when she got to stay at home for a prolonged period of time, nor do I remember her taking an actual vacation.

It saddens me that there are some people who are stuck in lower class statuses and has to work extra hard to provide the basic necessities for their family. Then there are those who just have to do a few runway shows and they can make a couple grand. I’m not saying that Gisele didn’t work hard to make it to where she is today, it just bothers me that there can be such a big disparity between lower class and upper class people. It wasn’t as if my parents are lazy people who never worked hard, but the language barriers they face as immigrants from another country makes it so much harder for them to find work here. Although Gisele is an immigrant herself, she got her start in her own homeland before making a mark for herself in the United States. The connections she made while she was on top in Brazil made it that much simpler for her to come here and settle into the culture of upper class America. I guess that is just the way life works.

I Love Watching Gossip Girl But...

I just watched the first episode Gossip Girl of this season. Every time I watch this guilty pleasure of mine I wish that I were able to transfer myself into the world of these girls. How often does a girl get to fly to Paris to heal heartbreak for an entire summer break? How often does a girl run into the prince of Monaco and gets asked out by him? Who gets to have the princess treatment along with the gift of a diamond necklace on the second date? Most likely, this will not happen to me.

With the memories of the past summer still fresh in my mind, I can’t help but think about the long hours I worked everyday at my internship. The amount of work was not a lot, but it was mainly some mindless, no fun, tedious tasks like photocopying papers and putting different documents in a file. Even friends of mine who could afford trips to France for no reason in the summer were busy working in New York. As a Harvard undergraduate, the need to do as many programs and internships as possible over the summer is a basic must. On the show, even those of lower class status were able to just sit around and take care of babies than worry about their future.

I experienced a similar feeling with my friends back home, a tinge of jealousy that they were leading such carefree summers while I struggled to find a meaningful internship over the summer. They did not feel the same sense of pressure that I had felt during the school year. Maybe this is the habitus that is mentioned in class. My fellow classmates and I are constantly in an environment where we are bombarded with information and seminars about summer internships and we have become used to this experience whereas people from other schools don’t have a similar motto.