I was born in downtown Manhattan to two immigrant parents: one from Northern China, and one from the South. In China, their marriage would be considered strange by most of their peers, but in New York, no one could heckle them about their cultural differences. I spent the first few years of my life being taken care of by my maternal grandparents, however, because my parents were both busy working. When I was four, I came back to the U.S and started pre-K. From a young age, my family pressured me to follow the well-worn path taken by many immigrant children before me: do well in school, attend an Ivy League college, become a doctor, earn a six-figure salary and enjoy life with your spouse and children. It took me more than a decade to realize that although that kind of life sounds great, it’s neither a path which I am very keen on following nor one that best fits my interests and abilities.

So what do I do with my life? This question plagued me all throughout my junior and senior years of high school, and to this day I’m still not really sure where I’m going. I’m a firm believer that one should dabble in a little bit of everything, however, so I’m trying to make the most out of college and of life in New York City. Hopefully, everything will fall into place once I’ve found a lifestyle that makes me look forward to waking up each morning.

After spending elementary and middle school in Flushing, Queens, I gained a good amount of knowledge about the MTA when I started commuting to high school in downtown Manhattan. Riding the trains back and forth between Main Street and Tribeca every day was daunting at first, but it slowly grew on me and I came to appreciate how easy it was to get from A to B once I got used to reading the subway map. However, my naïve ninth-grade self soon learned the horrors of delays and service changes. From “train traffic” to “sick passengers” and the occasional “police investigation”, I’d like to say I’ve heard it all. Once, my express train was stuck on the tracks because it was snowing and the rails were icy. We sat in between stations for 30 minutes, inching forward bit by bit and listening to the local trains flying by, the click-clacking of their wheels laughingly mocking: “Who’s the slow one now?”

For a good three years, I was one of the many people who dismissed the MTA as a necessary evil that was incompetent and a waste of our money. However, after I learned about the long history of the subway in my New York City History elective, I realized that fixing the issues we see throughout the subway system today requires an insane amount of planning and funding. Although many aspects of our transit system are long overdue for improvements, things could always be worse. Ultimately, I do have to acknowledge that when there are no delays or breakdowns, the MTA is an efficient, budget-friendly way to travel throughout the city, and I might even be a tiny bit grateful that it exists.