Why I'm Majoring in International Relations

Hi! Beginnings aren’t really my strength, so I’ll just get to the point. Also…I spent the last seven weeks making words coherent…and I honestly think coherency is overrated so please bear with me/this is gonna be chaotic.

:)

Okay, so! Going into freshman year, I was almost entirely certain that I would be double-majoring in International Relations and English.

English was an obvious choice; I was very much the writing/literary person back in high school. But what about IR? I didn’t really care about politics, domestic or international, until I was sixteen. It wasn’t that I didn’t think they were important—I was just too caught up with the game of college apps and high school. My political opinions were largely derivative; I didn’t know enough to do anything but jump on bandwagons.

The summer of 2018 was a gamechanger. I went to Stanford for its bougie high school summer program, where I took eight weeks of Intro to International Relations with Professor Mike Tomz. I also took two other classes—a seminar on comparative literature and a discussion-based English class—but I’d already made up my mind by Week 2: I was deeply in love with my IR class. Part of the magic was Professor Tomz himself, who was equal parts lightning-rod lecturer and Uncle-Iroh-esque mentor (in Week 6, I fell off my bike and sprained my ankle, but insisted on limping half a mile to Encina Hall to catch his office hours). But it’d be impossible to discount how riveting IR was as a subject. We covered interstate war and domestic insurgency in the first month of the class—which is my current area of research—and something just clicked. It didn’t matter how little I’d known about IR before then; it didn’t matter how much supplementary reading I had to do to catch up with the class content. The stakes of that summer were as low as they’d ever been, and I took full advantage of Stanford’s resources. I approached Dr. Lindsay Hundley, my TA at the time, and asked to help her with research. She agreed, and I spent July and August compiling timelines and notes about the Haitian slave revolt. I expected research to be cool, but it was also really fun. And, pretty soon, I was spending several hours a day on my RAship and IR class. It was a blissful time.

I didn’t do much with IR after leaving Stanford, but I did apply to college with IR in mind (I also spent more time reading the news, if that counts for anything……it probably doesn’t count for anything). To me, the most magical part of my college experience would be found in the IR department; my IR class had forced me to think at a pace and level I’d never previously experienced. In the months after that summer, whenever I looked back at Stanford, my mind would jump to that class. I missed it to the point of pain.

Fast forward to freshman year! I barely spent an hour moving in before biking—with both ankles intact—to Encina Hall. But I didn’t get to see either Professor Tomz or Dr. Hundley. (Professor Tomz was now researching in Africa, and Dr. Hundley was at Harvard.) I didn’t take a political science or IR class in the fall, mainly because I wanted to explore East Asian Studies and philosophy. Although neither gave me the same sense of excitement I’d felt in 2018, I hesitated to pass judgement on my classes. I ascribed my lack of enthusiasm to general freshman year messiness, and I was very determined not to make up my mind too early. It wasn’t out of any desire to make informed decisions—I just didn’t want to commit to anything.

Then came winter quarter. Alongside SLE, I took Chang-rae Lee’s class on Asian-American fiction (ENG 91A) and International Security in the Changing World (INTNLREL 114S) with Professors Harold Trinkunas, Scott Sagan, and Joe Felter. And, through a slow process of elimination, I began to return to IR.

See, SLE taught me that I’m just not a pHiLoSoPhIcAL gal. I have a whole spiel about the “western canon” and the arbitrary categorization (and hypocrisy) of so many philosophers we hold in high esteem, but that’s for another day. Even though I loved SLE, I frequently found myself losing patience at the vague paper prompts, the lofty discussions (who CARES?), and the derivative and convoluted analysis. No hate, though—SLE helped me grow tremendously as a thinker and writer, and I made some of my best friends through it. The English/philosophy thing just wasn’t…really for me.

Asian-American Autobiography was the first creative writing class I took at Stanford. I had high expectations, and the class exceeded them—learning alongside some extraordinarily talented AsAm writers was one of the highlights of my college experience. But again (and you’re probably seeing a pattern by now; all of these classes are great, but my personal preferences are somewhat exacting), I found myself losing patience at the continued angst and sAdNeSs. Don’t get me wrong; I love angst (20% of my mind is angst), and I think writing is a great way to heal or channel sadness. But to be steeped in so much pain, theory, and sadness all the time? It was a privilege to be reading about others’ vulnerable moments and pain, but I found parts of the experience overwhelming.

Also, I’m not very good at fitting prose and poetry into an academic setting. I’m notorious for not knowing how to edit my poems (this is a seriously question, though—how do y’all edit poems?? I just change things around until the vibes align??); I never respect creative writing deadlines; I write on a whim and forget about my pieces for months. This isn’t a critique of writing classes, but a study of my own writing style. It’s easy to set deadlines for myself when I write more commercial or traditional fiction, but literary fiction is different—it’s about as whimsical as I can get.

Oh yeah, and I’m not the best at (very bad at) separating my professional life from my personal life. Writing definitely blurs the line between the two, and majoring in creative writing would be somewhat whack.

That’s where my international security class came in! It was such a breath of fresh air compared to all my other classes. It was fast-paced, impersonal, and deeply engaging. It was a direct study of the world outside Stanford. And it was fun. Truth be told, I’ve gotten very good at BS’ing my work—in both SLE, where I could get by easily without doing any reading, and in creative writing, where I could just dig into the nearest source of angst and throw together a bunch of nonsensical metaphors and imagery—and international relations doesn’t allow me to do that. If I don’t understand Eisenhower or the Kowloon Walled City or C4ISR in the Russian military, no amount of BS’ing can save my ass. International relations holds me accountable, and it’s refreshing to be challenged in that way.

But because creative writing and East Asian Studies are fun, I’ll be double minoring. (I’m not double majoring because…I want a life. Lol. Maybe that’ll change.)

In spring quarter, following a debacle of an Econ experience, I’d more or less decided to major in IR. You see, by the end of freshman year, I’d shepherded my decision-making process into two broad categories. The first was how much I would like the major, and how much it would help me grow as a person. The second included all the external factors: how useful it’d be for a career, how pertinent it was to current events, and (high school hoop-jumping go brr) prestige.

IR is by no means a perfect match for these criteria. I’m not expecting my major to pave the path to a perfect career, nor do I treat IR as a homogenous field. But an IR major would be one of the best tools for me to sync up those two categories. I’m specializing in international security and U.S.-East Asia relations, and I’m especially interested in areas of strategic collaboration and collective security. My courseload this quarter, as well as the research I’m doing with CISAC, really helped solidify that.

Returning to the criteria I mentioned above: I didn’t choose IR because I thought creative writing or East Asian Studies were “soft,” or that I wouldn’t be able to make an impact with those majors. But I think IR is ultimately the best match with my disposition and interests. Even if I don’t end up making an impact as a professor or lawyer or researcher, IR will help me understand the world outside my laptop and angst. The skills I learn from IR will be the most broadly applicable to any future career. It’s hard to make an impact on a world you don’t understand.

I should probably conclude this post with a few discombobulated thoughts. I haven’t figured out the answers to these questions, but I think they’re worth including just for shits and giggles.

• One possible career is in research. But even if I did join a thinktank or research group, which I really don’t think I’d do, research takes forever to be translated into policy. So would a career with a thinktank/research group be all that valuable?

• What about becoming a professor or going into academia? Would that just another extension of my jumping-through-hoops syndrome? One of my friends told me that most freshmen say they want to become professors, mainly because those people are the most visible and readily accessible.

• On the other hand, I do need structure. Going back to my July talk with Zen Cho: she said she needs something more than the unstructured, emotionally up-and-down career of publishing. So she’s also a lawyer.

• One of my friends says that in such an unstable and uncertain world, the only thing we can be really certain of is our own happiness. But happiness is already such a strange concept. I’m very, very good at gaslighting myself, and I don’t know how delayed gratification and external validation plays into genuine happiness.

• I think about “selling out” a lot. But I don’t know how much of that talk is motivated by genuine concern for others or by my own guilt. After all, before coming to college, I was never that committed to giving back to my community (well, except for my last semester in high school, when I launched It’s Real). So how much does this desire to give back arise from my position of relative safety and privilege? If I weren’t at Stanford, with all its resources and MoNeY, would I be thinking in the same way? Or would I still be focused on buffing up my image and impressing a bunch of lofty institutions? How much of this desire to “give back” originates from my need to impress others, anyways?

But I think that’s all for today! I think I’ve finally begun to realize that college is only one piece of my life and career, and that the mindsets that carried me through high school—the need to figure things out in four short years—is no longer applicable. Thanks for sticking through this mess of a blog post, and happy Halloween! I’m thinking of walking around my neighborhood without a mask on tomorrow.

Just kidding—I’ll probably go as a CS major who wants to “change the world for the better” and just gets employed by Google.