Hi everyone!
I’m Christal! I’m 22 and will be graduating from BMCC Spring 2021 with an A.S. in Human Services. I’m the Office Manager for a Muay Thai school & gym nearby BMCC, so I dabble in Muay Thai/Boxing (but mostly just send emails allll day). I’m working on committing to yoga and currently have a billion plants in my room (because it seems to be my goal to live in a Brooklyn jungle).
My professional interests lie in various facets of social justice, public policy, and community work. I’m not sure what field that will lead me to exactly, but I’m excited to use my developed passion for justice, communication skills, and empowerment geared, people oriented nature to help shape the world into a brighter place. I am currently extremely grateful to be a Leadership Fellow with the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute, a fellowship program which seeks to identify up and coming leaders in NYC food justice. It has been challenging, but beyond interesting to explore career paths I didn’t know existed and to grow professionally! If anyone is interested, I’m happy to pass along application info if the fellowship continues into 2021 (it isn’t advertised to BMCC students for some reason, even tho its CUNY wide, which sucks!)
As a second generation Chinese-American, I think it is extremely important to be connected to one’s culture as well as aware of other POC communities’ histories and values! My primary concern with the course is with how much of America’s complex racist/xenophobic history toward various Asian-American groups might make me feel personally while learning in class, especially since these attitudes still exist today. I think its key to understand history so we can do better in the current and I hope we’re all able to learn with this in mind! 🙂
Edit: I realized I forgot to include my experiences with writing (and also that I’m short of the word count)! I have always loved English, both writing and reading it. I’m fortunate to have been able to develop my skills and feel extremely confident in them. My only apprehension is that I do tend to struggle with research papers. I have experience writing a few of this length and type, starting from high school. However, I’ve always struggled with picking a topic, committing to it, and being able to fully plan out my thoughts/argument. I usually find myself running behind schedule and anxiously hammering disjointed words down on paper for the sake of meeting deadlines. I’m cautiously optimistic about improving this past habit and challenging myself to write a paper to my full ability.
Hi Christal Yu, I just wanna say I really like when you said “As a second generation Chinese-American, I think it is extremely important to be connected to one’s culture as well as aware of other POC communities’ histories and values!”. Cause I’m from Vietnam but my mother from China, that why i really want to know more about history of Asian.
hi Christal, Thank you for sharing some of your interests and experiences + I look forward to learning more about the different things you mention here…. and I also very much appreciate your point about what it may feel like to learn about histories of racism, exclusion, and other forms of violence. Let’s talk together as a class about how to ensure that this is a space that is attentive to the emotional dimensions of learning about difficult topics.