Name: Candice Cheung
Year: Freshman
Major: Human Development
Arriving at the courtyard for class, I started debating whether I wanted to interview a classmate or an artist first. Before I could decide, Candice came up to me after we made eye contact and we started a conversation. The reason she came up to me is that she is friends with my roommate and remembered me from a past meeting. I had heard about her a couple times before from my roommate and was curious to find out more about her. We wasted no time and went straight into finding out more about each other. She first asked me about where I’m from, my major, my ethnicity, etc… I returned the favor and found out some interesting things about her.
Before Candace was a Human Development Major, she was in the Pre-Nursing Program. She told me that the reason she decided to change was that she underestimated the difficulty of the program. However, she has a passion from helping people and did some research into other jobs where she could accomplish that. She decided that she wanted to get into Occupational Therapy. The only problem is that CSULB does not have a major specifically for OT. Her adviser her told her that the best route would be to become a Human Development Major and go to grad-school to obtain a degree for OT. The whole time she was telling me the process of landing in the major where she is now, I could hear in her voice how passionate she was about what she was saying. It was interesting hearing about how she worked her way into getting into the work she wanted to despite not being able to continue in the nursing program. I think her determination comes from the fact that her sister is also in the business of helping people. Her sister is also going to school to become a speech therapist and currently works as an assistant for a full time therapist.
After talking about our majors we moved into talking about the transition into college from high school, and I feel like this is when we began to really open up. She told me about how she didn’t have too many friends here from her high school, and how she is not the most social person when there isn’t someone to facilitate meeting new people which made it hard for her to make friends at first. She then told me about how she found a christian club called EPIC on campus that really helped her open up and make more friends. This worked well since I was also in a christian club and we talked about how these clubs helped us grow and become more social in college.
The thing I learned from my first classmate interview is something that I knew all along and just had it reinforced; everyone has a story of why they are who they are. How they act, their friends, their attitude, all of these stem from experiences. No one is just born with set traits. Learning about her family, passions, and experiences are a testament to this fact, and with the way Candice talked, I would have never guessed that she had trouble making friends at first. The conversation flowed pretty well and didn’t really seem all that awkward at any point.
gatetonate 