Oi Yee

My immigration to the United States has been the most significant experience that I had in my life so far because it has helped to shape the way I am today.  I immigrated from China, my home, to this country with my family six years ago. The language barrier made our new lives in this country extremely difficult at the beginning. I was completely alienated in my new schools since I could not communicate with my new classmates and teachers. My parents suffered even more—they were confined to work in laborious jobs, such as a sewing factory worker and a construction worker, because of their inability to speak English. Honestly, I thought of fleeing back to China, where I knew the language and had many good friends and where my parents had good jobs. However, I decided to face the challenge when I thought of the sacrifices that my parents made for my siblings and me. I had to show them that their sacrifices would bring me a promising future in this country. This determination has motivated me to work hard since then.

After six years of hard work, my English has been effectively improved. I still cannot say I speak fluent English at this point; however, I have no troubles in communicating with other people now. This was one of the biggest achievements that I have accomplished after I moved to this new home. Another accomplishment that I had was my enrollment to Barnard College. Studying at Barnard further expands my passion in Mathematics. At the beginning, I only viewed my Math classes as an escape since they had mostly numbers and equations, which I found them more comprehensible and easier than English. As I learned more about different branches of Mathematics, I became to love it. I love it since there can be many different ways to approach the same problem; it also relates to many different subjects and can be applied to everywhere. My Math classes at Barnard further demonstrated these aspects of Mathematics to me. For the upcoming academic year at Barnard, I want to explore more about Mathematics, especially the ways that it can be used to analyze the economy, since I want to major in both Mathematics and Economics.

In the future, I hope to use my mathematic skills and my analytical reasoning to contribute to both economies of China and the United States, my two homes; thus, I want to go into the business field. In order to realize my dream, I need to have a good communication skill and big networking; moreover, I also need to gain more practical experiences from the business field. I am confident that I would be able to gain all these from participating in the NYNY fellowship program, which will equip me for realizing my big dream.