Power Struggles in Professionalism
For every setting that there is professionalism, despite one’s age or focus, there is power. I began focusing on professional development in my first year of high school, eventually molding my routine and goals around it up until college. Maybe it was a result of my high school’s unique structure: an emphasis on real-world experience rather than standardized testing. But the main reason may have been that there were several arbitrary factors playing that were against my odds, rendering me powerless in more ways than one. When I started high school, I was a young, immigrant Asian American girl who, after the death of her mother, her sole guardian, was also a low-income dependent of the state. While I was blessed to receive a full scholarship to a private high school, I was subsequently surrounded by wealthy, white students. For every day I went to class, both in high school and at the University of Florida (UF), I was always aware of a power imbalance. An imbalance of e...