In high school my parents stopped caring about exactly what I do. To be more precise, they gave up on deciphering what actually it is that constituted the daily schedule of someone who was member of this gifted high school model and also intent on applying to college overseas. My parents were children of post-war reconstruction. My dad’s journey to getting a Bachelor’s degree was fraught with back-to-back instances of him almost not going to school anymore. Education is of utmost importance to the Vietnamese populace of their generation, but the fabric of society in urban Vietnam has shifted radically since they moved to Hanoi that, by 9th grade, how further education would work for me eluded them.

In the past year, I have paused several times to realize the extent of change I have afforded myself. As a stereotypical Yale student, I try as much as I can to overcommit, spreading myself just thin enough to still be eligible for specialized knowledge of my major. I relish in the possibility of invincibility in conquering different realms of knowledge. There are several motivational rationales for why my enthusiasms span across disciplines, but I am also really unwilling to be singularly technical without a more humanistic approach to life.

So far my academic strategems have worked out in my favor. My rapid uptake of the English language during 9th grade tided me over high school, wherein my opportune excursions in the Model UN world endowed me with a desire to study International Relations. Then I started to realize how much I enjoyed studying the SAT Subject Tests that involved the natural sciences, and lucked into the accelerated programs in Chemistry in college. I preferred to think about potential application of information, and once again chanced upon my current majors as perfect avenues to attempt both rigor and diversity.

In most of these cases, I am never the earliest of my cohort to decide on the pursuit. Especially with the transition from high school to college, for the longest time I felt unsure of what standards I should be operating under to be satisfactory, let alone outstanding. I would look externally at the accomplishments that I could acquire to position myself in the sea of others,, almost as a coping mechanism to overcompensate for my ill-preparedness. In high school, it was not until I won a national award that I felt like I was enough. In college, it was not until I got this honor my junior fall that I felt like I belonged. It is consistently the sense of discomfort that I leverage to push myself, but it was consequently the sense of fulfillment that I equated with complacency and sought to suppress.

My tenure at Yale can be generalized to this dichotomy. When I first joined YIRA conferences, I always wanted to qualify for more powerful positions, but once I achieved them, it felt weird that it was me who was given this privilege. When I was tutoring for Intermediate Microeconomics for the first time, I greatly prided myself on my ability to explain what the course wanted students to know, but found it nonsensical that I was the one charged with the responsibility of having somewhat mastered the content. I barely scratched the surface! I lost faith in honors, because as soon as I achieved something, I acquired a newfound manifestation of imposter syndrome.

In academia, honors are powerful. When you are in the running for higher-stakes opportunities, honors made you stand out as the best of the best, the crème de la crème. It conveys supporting material with the highest density of information and signals the least amount of risk the awarding institutions would have to make. In a lot of ways, academics strive to be the expert in their field, on top of making their field more prominent; honors are thus an even more efficacious tool to announce to the public the scope of contributions you have made. I think that, for as long as scholars should not have to be financially incentivized, honors can remain part of the modus operandi of the academic ivory tower. Perhaps I just could not help but doubt, ‘Am I supposed to become the example?’

There is a redeeming intrinsic quality of honors that is its reflection of the self. I take much less joy in being nominally more auspicious than my peers and more in how it reminds me of how far I have come. In the scholastic sprint for knowledge, paused only by breaks of caffeine withdrawals, honors give me a sensible checkpoint to acknowledge the fact that, maybe I have not gone far, but I am going in the right direction. If I am comfortable with at least where I am headed for, then maybe I feel more secure about myself. The holy grail of discovering whatever cutting-edge impact I aspire to make can be more marathonic. In many cases, honors can feel zero-sum, debilitatingly comparative at the expense of communal progress. But honors can be not an end; they can be a start.

Joon and Elliot always joke about how, whenever I explain to them the circumstantial plight of my background, the amount of self-congratulatory stories that I end up telling outshines the actual point I am trying to make. I do not think about myself as pitiable, nor do I believe that the obstacles that I have overcome are in the same order of magnitude that many awe-inspiring figures have had themselves. Sometimes I just do not think that my successes are actually that impressive, while my failures are way more pronounced. I elect to bear the burden of feeling underwhelming, as I believe my integrity is best maintained when I find myself lacking. Somehow life feels more worth living that way, when my joy is fully internalized and my growth does not feel stunted.

Today I will be formally awarded another honor that, once again, I have always wanted to have but was perplexed when I actually obtain. I spoke to Elliot earlier about my confusion of how the process actually works; without going into much detail we both were taken aback by the reality of our times here on campus. We are becoming the stories we have read. “I mean I’ll take it” has been my reaction, but to say that I have grown to at least appreciate the honor, compared to my philosophical rejection of previous ones, is still a work in progress.