Reflections

Our interns have to turn in a final reflections essay for the field studies class, so I looked my essay from two years ago up just to see how long the paper was. I read it, and was surprised to see how even though I've had so many life-changing experiences in the last two years, a lot of what I am doing now were encompassed in my hopes and goals that I discussed in the paper.

ES 97

11 May 2007

Final Reflections Paper

This semester when we were given our intern binders, I wrote that I wanted two things out of the intern program: a voice, and confidence in my leadership abilities. My goals were to feel like my opinion is valid enough to stand up for, and to plan an event. Over the course of this semester, I think I have achieved all of these things and then some.

The first event I started to plan was the independent project for the subcommittees, which ended up to be the karaoke social. However, the first “event” that I had a hand in that was executed was core elections, which I assisted Chris in facilitating. In addition to learning basic technical things about running elections (or any meeting), I got to understand what each of the positions required, and it was incredibly rewarding to know that I helped bring everyone together for elections. Election night was an exciting time because we all got to sit down and determine the future direction of NSU. Organizing something that is so important for NSU was a first for me, and at the beginning of the semester I didn’t think I would be doing something like that. In the process I learned how much I really care about NSU. Even though I will not be around next spring and am thus ineligible to run for core, I had a surprising amount of concern for what happens next year, and it has carried over into everything else I am asked or volunteer to do with NSU and the JA community.

Looking back, the trend in my progress seems to be tied a lot to confidence. I had all the things I needed to be a leader, but the confidence required to realize my potential was not there. However, after the biweekly meetings and workshops, I began to see that the things I wanted to do were not so difficult as long as I didn’t drop the ball and kept at it. An example of this is the workshop we did at the intern retreat about sending e-mails. Before this I was definitely a culprit sending rambling, off-topic e-mails that oftentimes lacked cohesion. Once I realized that there are certain things one should and should not include into e-mails, I still had trouble with them: it would take me upwards of forty-five minutes to get an e-mail to say what I wanted it to say while keeping it professional. After some time I realized that the reason why I had such a hard time getting things down to their bare bones was because I didn’t feel comfortable just asking people for something or telling them what I needed of them. Instead of being direct, I was always skirting around the subject and hinting at what I wanted. Naturally, it would take me a long time to get to my point, and oftentimes did not yield the responses I was looking for. By the end of the semester, however, I became assertive enough to be able to do this, and now writing e-mails is no longer a problem for me. Just last night I sent out a mass e-mail to people to announce an event and ask for people to RSVP, and it only took me ten minutes to write. E-mails may seem trivial, but this is a reflection of the greater change that I’ve gone through as a result of the intern program.
Working with all of the other interns and the core members has exposed me to numerous aspects of leadership development, and it has definitely changed my perceptions about who is and isn’t a leader. I didn’t expect some of the interns to have any desire to take on a leadership role, but many of them surprised me, and I did find that there are varying styles of leadership. The biggest illustration of this for me was during our subcommittee project when Eulanca and I worked together: while we are both driven toward the same goal and cared about the event equally, the details we would get caught up on differed. Sometimes it seemed like we were miscommunicating because she would ask me about a snag I felt like I had just fixed, but eventually I came to understand that we just had different methods of dealing with the same problems. I really enjoyed putting on the karaoke event, and felt a good deal of satisfaction when everyone enjoyed themselves, because that is the main point of a social event. At the beginning of the semester I was very hesitant to put on an event for NSU, but with the help of the rest of my subcommittee, it turned out to be a pleasant experience, and it was a lot less daunting than I had originally anticipated.

Within the Japanese-American community, my ideas of who is a leader has been turned around. Many of the leaders we met with seemed to be unlikely leaders – for instance, many Japantown leaders did not grow up in Japantown – and it showed me that in order to be a leader within the Japanese-American community, you just have to step up and demand your spot within the community. While the Japanese-American community at Cal has an open-door policy, you still have to walk through the door. If you have the desire, enthusiasm, and energy, then you can find your spot.

Throughout the course of the semester I was also made much more aware of the scope of the local Japanese-American community in relation to the greater community. Many people talk about the fact that Japantown in San Francisco could very easily die (and I don’t necessarily disagree with that), but if you look at the community I came from, San Francisco’s community is so much stronger and healthier. The issue facing the community in San Luis Obispo county is a lack of youth leadership – much more so than in the Bay Area – due partly to the fact that nobody is encouraging this, and partly because people my age move away to grow up and get an education (myself included) and then oftentimes don’t make it back home. So on one hand this has been an amazing opportunity for me to see what my hometown community could be like – busy and serving the needs of the people in it – and on the other hand I know what it would be like if Japantown were to cease exist. As a City Planning minor, I would really love to become a link between the Japanese-American community and larger planning entities such as the City or the State, because it allows me to do apply what I am learning to do in school to a community that I really care about.

The JA community does not exist in a vacuum, and it must interact with government entities, physical neighbors, and other ethnic communities as well. My involvement with the API community, specifically with the Asian Pacific American Coalition, has illustrated for me the issues that make the JA community different and similar to other communities. I think my involvement with APAC has also forced me to step up as leader because people from other organizations see me as a representative of NSU and the JA community, so I had to start acting like it. Though I was initially intimidated at the AAPI Leadership Summit in January, I’m really glad I have become involved with APAC because so many of the people have inspired me with their energy and drive, and they are willing to help us out and come together in times of need.

Along the same lines, one of the biggest take-aways I’ve gotten out of this experience goes along with what Kristy said during the first J-town site visit about showing up and being at the right place in the right time. Many of the things that we get to do as an organization happens simply because we show up. Among the APAC community, NSU is getting a reputation for always representing itself, which is a reflection of this. For example, many of us came out to the ASUC Finance Committee meeting to petition to get more money from the ASUC; I stayed until past 2:00am, and Colleen and a few others stayed until they got around to deciding about us at 6:00am – on a Tuesday morning. Because we showed up and showed that we cared and were dedicated, we were allotted more than twice the amount of money we were originally budgeted. This is just one example of the type of commitment that leaders within our community have. It’s not necessarily difficult to do this, but a tremendous amount of passion is required to have the dedication to consistently be there.

Going one step beyond this, it is more than showing up. It is having the abilities to see the opportunities that are around you and taking the opportunities. Sometimes it is not so easy to see these opportunities – that’s the hard part. Once you’ve found them, you have to go after them. You can’t just sit there and say you want a chance – you have to go after it and take it. I think that when I said I wanted to develop my own voice, I didn’t mean that I wanted to learn how to sit around and talk about things. I mean, that is the first step and it is nice and all, but what I really wanted to do was to take all of my “I want to do’s” and make them into “I am doing’s”. In many small ways, I am doing that through e-mails, or speaking up in another course I am taking about communities, or taking a critical look at who I voted for during APAC elections. The intern program has been a catalyst for this, but I am by no means a fully developed leader, and I think I am still finding my place within the JA community. However, I am well on my way to getting where I know I can be, and the skills and connections I’ve gained through this course has set me up to be a success rather than a failure.

Some comments:

• I've got no problem sending out direct emails now.
• Am I one of those unlikely leaders now?
• I can't believe I am getting to work in the field of planning AND with my community when I graduate. I never thought I'd get to do that right out of school, let alone get paid for it.
• I keep saying it and hoping people will listen, JUST SHOW UP. I didn't do this today though. What I have learned since 2007 is that if you don't always show up, you have to find it in you to take charge of the situation. "what can I do to fix this?" and "what can I do in the future?" have got to be asked -- right now.
• I can only hope that this year's interns are as empowered as I was at the end of the term.