Tread Gently for You Tread on My Dreams

Upon acceptance to Columbia College in April 2005, I was forced between the usual rock and the hard place: a good education or financial freedom. In a family where I would have been the first to pursue tertiary studies, there was no money put aside for me to attend an Ivy League college, let alone one in a foreign country.

My plight seemed all-encompassing during the summer of 2005 as I eagerly awaited the Singaporean Columbia Alumni Organization’s welcome party for those who had been accepted into Columbia that year—two students to CC and five to SEAS. Upon meeting my first Columbia administrator, an officer in charge of student recruitment in the Asian region, I was honored that she remembered my application essay, my intended major, and my desire to study German.

As a naïve pre-frosh, having read up about how helpful Columbia was in student advising, I pulled the administrator aside into a corner of the ballroom and explained my financial situation to her. Immediately, all smiles dropped as she hit me with the first grains of difficult truth I was to face in my upcoming tenure at Columbia.

Despite being welcomed into the “diverse” Columbia family and even accepted into the prestigious Columbia Scholars Program (now known as Columbia University Scholars Program) as a Global Scholar (how ironic), she told me with a straight face that had I checked the “need financial aid” box, I would not have been sharing Coke and hors d’oeuvres with her at the Singapore American Club. In essence, my need for Columbia’s money would have prohibited my admission to the University, no matter how good a candidate I was.

But since I was desperate to live in New York, I took desperate measures. At the tender age of 19 I signed away, perhaps prostituted away, ten years of my life—four at Columbia, then six with the agency—to a statutory board of the Singaporean government in exchange for them granting the favor of funding my education. The decision made to come to Columbia came at a heavy price: it was my dream school, but it would not be the place for my dreams to come through.

Upon graduation, I will be legally and contractually bound to return home to work for that agency for six years, in any job, in any department, at any pay, at the government’s discretion. So in essence, coming to Columbia was not an act of discovering myself, but fulfilling that Faustian signature I had left on that governmental legal contract.

Fast forward two and a half years: midway into the fall of my junior year and mortified by what I had done, I was desperately looking for ways out. Having had to convert to a major in urban studies in order to please my sponsoring agency, I had to drop all my interests in German and literature.

All the sturm und drang was instead focused into finishing a double major to ensure that my sponsored stay here at Columbia would last four years. Had I had the pleasure of taking my time with the Core and completing the requirements of only one major, my sponsorship would have lasted only three years. With urban studies as one of the most rigorous majors on campus and with Columbia’s celebrated but intensive core, it would have necessitated taking 7.5 classes a semester in order to graduate in three years.

So I tried to console myself, and I redirected my interests somewhere else—into sociology, a path that complemented and enhanced my study of the city under urban studies, a field I came to love and cherish intensely. But $25,000 stood in my way. I knew then that I would never be happy to be stuck under my government’s whim for 6 full years and did my best to find a strategy that would let me reduce the sponsorship amount. The pressures of graduating in three and a half years, taking one semester’s cost away, brought me not just stress but a nervous breakdown that resulted in a diagnosis of clinical depression and an anxiety disorder.

So if you ever wonder why so many of those “rich” international students are always striving to graduate in three years or just earlier than the rest of the class, it may not be the mere fact that we tend to be overachievers by nature. We might have been forced to become this way.

With a school that lags so far behind the need-blind financial structures of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, and whose attention to international students is so wane that the school hides our main International Students and Scholars Office up at 122nd Street and Riverside Drive, we have little choice but to complete our studies early or keep forking out $45,000 for every year we cannot afford to stay on. Ineligible for American federal aid and private scholarships, we are the ones that bear the full costs of Columbia’s tuition, not to mention a ridiculous $50 international student fee.

Even following Dean Austin Quigley’s triumphant tone in his March 11, 2008 e-mail detailing the changes to international student financial aid, my visit to the financial aid office to test out this new policy ended with a quick 5-minute interview where the answer was once again, “No, I’m sorry, but no; it’s only for ENTERING students in the class of 2012”.

Sometimes stepping onto the magnificently preserved South Lawn, I wonder how much of my sold dreams went into the planting of those beautiful grasses.

The author is a Columbia College junior majoring in sociology and urban studies.