My Life as an Alien: a Personal Insight on Immigrating to the U.S

If something isn’t talked, written, or published about, it might as well be like it doesn’t exist, or even moreso, that it doesn’t matter. Immigrating to the U.S. through the acquisition of a visa was supposed to be a…

WP1: A Needle in a Haystack?

Jake Rutsky

It’s hard to get past stereotypes when, from the outside, you essentially are a stereotype. I mean in a lot of ways this is a good thing. It means I’ve been placed in a safety bubble in which no one can enter and from which no one can exit…

Honey Brown Box Braids

“My name is Mya. I’m a first-generation student from Louisiana. As a young African American woman, my boundaries are constantly challenged and pushed. Every day, I have to recognize how these situations affect me, and therefore how I can grow from them. I deeply cherish my relationships…

WP1 Ode to the Oreos: Growing up Black in the Suburbs

I didn’t grow up “in Chicago”, at least no one from the city would say I did. I grew up in the suburb where the West Side ends, Oak Park. It’s like Chicago in many ways, one of which being its surface level of diversity. There were many…

WP1: Feel the fire beneath your feet

A man with high self-esteem trying to live with it. This is the clearest description of how I…

Stereotyped: Breaking Free

Content warning: This piece briefly mentions issues regarding mental health.

I used to hate being Chinese.

Everyone around me was different. No… I was different than everyone else. Growing up in Cleveland, I was always the odd one…

WP1: Redefining First-Generation

“So what do your parents do?” my teachers ask. Every time I heard this question, it made me flinch. I have always been self-conscious about sharing my family’s background. I’m a child of immigrants who could not go to college, living frugal lives. When I hear about kids…

Creativity in a Vietnamese American Boy

It just didn’t make any sense, I repeatedly thought to myself as I sat in my dorm room, unable to make significant progress in my Game Design Workshop class. In this class, we are tasked with making board games with next to no constraints. It is an assignment…

WP1: Barbies Don’t Wear Lab Coats

I remember one time in my AP Physics class, the school’s “genius” was my lab partner, and we both got different results for a calculation. After figuring out my answer was the correct one, he goes, “oh shit you’re actually right.” I wasn’t really surprised by his…