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What would’ve happened if I weren’t a CAPS major?

In the past month, I’ve been asking myself the question a lot. What would I have differently in my four years? How will the coming years be different? It’s a completely moot point, but sometimes, you can’t help but wonder. I imagine undergraduate decision-making to be a lot like 盆栽 (pén zai), the art form perhaps better known as bonsai, where the intial decisions you make is like pruning the branches of the tree, modifying the initial direction in which the branches grow, but not necessarily the ultimate spatial location of the branches.

If I weren’t a CAPS major:

1. I probably would not have gotten phone calls at 6:00 a.m. on Saturday mornings for the International Culture Festival. I had a lot of fun fundraising for the project and meeting new people, but man, 6:00 a.m. is way too early on a Saturday morning for a phone call. Looking back now, I think a large part of the reason why I got so involved (and received said weekend morning wake-up calls) was because I was doing for CAPS. I may have studied abroad in China, maybe even at Beida and worked at the Festival, but I don’t think I would have worked nearly as much without CAPS. Thanks to this experience, I am now an exceptionally efficient Superman cape maker who knows what it feels like to wake up after 3 hours of sleep to help set up on a Sunday morning, and who can also plaster a smile that same day and urge the apple-bobbers to 加油 while explaining the game’s rules in Chinese.

2. I wouldn’t have talked to as many older people in professional or social contexts. CAPS gave a lot of opportunities to meet with Cornell alumni in D.C. and Beijing in addition to academics and politicians with careers in U.S.-China relations. Meeting and greeting might feel unnatural at first, but when you do it over and over, you get used to it. I certainly think it helped me out a lot when I sat down with the business partners that own all of the Auntie Anne’s franchises in Beijing, and when I interviewed people decades older than me for research (Especially when I interviewed them in Chinese. You learn how many different ways people can speak Mandarin, it’s ridiculous.).

3. I would have been on significantly less adventures if it weren’t for CAPS. I’m not talking of just the trips that were organized by the program (Shandong!), but also of the side trips that I took with other students, and the occasional trips I ventured on my own. If it weren’t for CAPS, I wouldn’t have researched, and if it weren’t for the research, I would not have gone to conferences, one of which featured a dolphin show. So by the associative property, without CAPS, I may never have seen dolphins in Beijing.

4. I may have played more music cumulatively, if it weren’t for CAPS — every time I was away from Ithaca, I missed my friends, I missed my quartet partners, and I missed the orchestra. But when I was in China, if it weren’t for CAPS, I probably would have played less, and it if it weren’t for playing music at Beida, I wouldn’t have met half of my new friends in Beijing. After playing at Beijing University during the fall and at Loyola University in January, I truly, truly believe that sharing music is a great way to get a peek at cultural differences, whether it be on the other side of the International Date Line or the Mason-Dixon Line. Plus, I got to play new music. The Ode to the Red Flag is no Bartók’s Concerto For Orchestra, but it’s still music.

5. I’m not sure if I would have gotten to know as many driven, intelligent, and compassionate people as I have in the CAPS program. Cornell is populated with many people, many of whom are driven/intelligent/compassionate, but in CAPS, by really getting to know a smaller sliver of the population in academic and social environments, you can identify the different permutations of types of motivations, knowledge, and passions of your peers. It’s just awfully interesting, because some of us are incredibly different from each other (No, really, you’d be surprised), but we get along extremely well, and work well together, too.

I have no regrets about the decision I made spring of freshman year. This is in part because there is no point in regretting something that cannot be changed, but it’s mostly because I’ve been given many memories and opportunities and experiences from being part of the program, and also because I am still confident that it was the right decision for myself. The tree will be a tree; its branches may be askew, but it will keep growing, and it will be as strong as I will it.

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