Surreal September at Minerva University (2024)
Taiwanese culture shocks, a practical tip for college living, historical silences, and two hundred lifelong friends.
PS. Another Minerva professor on the Humans of Minerva podcast! The much-adored Professor Robert Karl, faculty of global history at Minerva. Learn about Prof Karl’s elevator pitch for ‘Why study history?’, his teaching and research journey from Dartmouth to Princeton to Harvard and finally Minerva, his published book on Columbian history, his breakdown of ‘Histrocity 1’ and ‘Histrocity 2’, and the movie which always brings him to tears (PS. Coco)…
Link:
Until then….
Taiwanese initial culture shocks
It’s been nearly a month since landing in Taipei, and boy, have I fallen in love with this city! Convenient public transport, delicious food, warm people, beautiful natural spaces, rich cultural and historical heritage, I could go on…
Our residence hall is located right next to the gorgeous Jingmei sports park (literally a 2-minute walk!) and it’s so heartwarming to see the Taiwanese locals, young and old, hanging out and exercising in the park from dawn to midnight – basketball, running, yoga, tai chi, romantic walks, I’ve seen it all happen right outside the window of my room, while I’m working. I also enjoy overcoming the language barrier through sport – that special common understanding between two basketball players on the same team, who can non-verbally communicate their way to the bucket!
Of course, culture shocks and the ‘typical mistakes of an outsider’ are part and parcel of the experience of setting up life in a foreign city. I’ve embraced the novelty, trying to keep my five senses open to new experiences, allowing me to slowly make the transition from outsider to ‘as local as an Indian can be in Taipei’…
Culture shock #1: The Taiwanese are highly disciplined people. Cutting through a crowd into the metro, forgetting to pay the bus fare, jaywalking – these were all practices that I adopted while spending a year in San Francisco. Here, rules reign supreme. The traffic is quite obedient (especially compared to home!), people line up to enter the metro and seldom push their way in even if they are getting late, and bicycles are left unlocked all over the streets and the university campus, indicating a high level of public trust.
Coming to public trust and safety, I admire the standards these people set for themselves and each other. People comfortably leave their phones and laptops outside in a café or restaurant and come back 30 minutes later with no doubt in their mind that their things are untouched. My friend lost his wallet in the metro. Back in the US or even in India, I am fairly certain this would have been a permanent loss, especially after the first 24 hours. But not in Taipei. The locals found the wallet, handed it over to the metro police, and the metro police called my friend and returned the wallet back to him three days later. Admirable!
Lastly, there is definitely a vibe of not wanting to impose on or disturb other people. Back in San Francisco, I frequently over-heard the loud conversations of friends or couples a few tables away from me at a café, and nobody asked them to quiet down, rather the collective volume was raised in that environment. As an Indian, my natural volume is quite high, and I’ve honestly lost count of the number of times I have been stared at on the metro/bus, in a restaurant or café, even on the street, because I was disturbing the silence or peace of that environment. Conversations are soft in a café or restaurant, the metros are generally silent or very low volume, and the libraries are so dead silent that I’ve had people tell me to type more quietly because they were getting disturbed!
A practical tip for college living
Talk to your counsellor / therapist on campus
A week ago, I had an interesting thought. Did I need to wait to have a mental health crisis or emotional breakdown before using the psychological services offered by Minerva? In my mind, of course not!
A counselling or therapy session is just a safe space to share your life update, wins and challenges at college, and find a compassionate listening ear to even verbalize your reflection/introspection regarding your personal growth journey through university. With this broader definition, I believe counselling might seem valuable to 100% of my Minerva classmates, even those that seem consistently on ‘Cloud 9’, emotionally.
So I reached out to our counselling team and proposed my idea – I clearly informed them that I just wanted to have a casual conversation, no mental or emotional issues as such. And they were thrilled because they completely aligned with my vision and definition of what counselling can be, for a university student.
A few days ago, I had an hour-long deep conversation with a wonderful psychologist on the team. This is what we spoke about:
· How I’ve grown as a human being, over the past year at Minerva
· Lessons I’ve learnt about making friends and connecting with my classmates
· Why I’m unable to prioritize sleep and exercise at university
· New practices/habits I can inculcate into my daily routine to enhance my personal and spiritual growth
· The mild homesickness which I realized I still carry with me, yet often suppress especially when calling home
There is an entire school of thought that encourages EVERY individual to go through a series of counselling/therapy sessions, regardless of whether their mental health is ‘on top of the world’ because we all have certain deep-rooted fears, pain, regrets, desires, dreams, hopes which come to the surface in a vulnerable, safe space where we can feel ‘truly heard’.
My proposal is milder. To every university student out there, schedule one session with your school counsellor. Enter that space with as much vulnerability as suits you, and talk about absolutely anything in the world, even if that’s just a simple life update. Enjoy spending that 30-60 minutes with somebody who just cares about listening to what you have to say and asking nuanced questions to probe deeper into your experiences.
Every single day at Minerva, so much sensory information is thrown at me. I learn new concepts in class, I think deeply about what to write in my assignments, I engage with the city I’m in, I have interesting conversations with classmates, I explore a new restaurant/ library/café…I personally believe much of this information goes unprocessed until the very end of the semester. If nothing else, my purpose of going to counselling is to verbalize my experiences – my growth, my future vision, my fears, my failures, everything that’s happened at university over the recent weeks and months, because you never know when a hidden realization or reflection might change your entire worldview.
Academics at Minerva – Global History
Topic highlight
Historical silences
Let me begin by prefacing that the way history is taught at Minerva is worlds apart from the way I studied history in school. Minerva refuses to teach us pure facts, like names, dates, specific events, just for the sake of memorization – anything that can be easily found through one google search is not on our syllabus. We focus more upon the tools, methods, concepts, frameworks, perspectives through which history is created, taught, studied, and then if required, we spend some time on a specific historical events with names, dates and significant individuals, just to ground our more abstract concepts through real-world examples.
Last class we explored the topic of historical silences.
There are two histories. ‘Historicity 1’ refers to the actual events that occurred in the past, independent of how they are later recorded or interpreted. It encompasses everything that happened, whether or not it is documented or remembered. We would like to think that this is the history which we teach our children in school, but that’s often far from the truth. ‘Historicity 2’ is the stories, narratives, and interpretations that we construct about our past. It includes the way historical events are represented, remembered and silenced. This is the history we are taught in school, which is seldom 100% objective. There is an entire neighboring field to history which is called ‘Historiography’, referring to the study of how history is written, who writes history, and the role of power in deciding what/who gets remembered and what is forgotten and left behind.
Historical silences refer to the voices that are considered unworthy of any space or words in our history textbooks. The forgotten African American slave whose powerful narrative nobody bothered to document, perhaps over-shadowed by the narrative of their Caucasian owner who did have the education, time and resources to pen down his autobiography. And maybe we can never recover the lost stories of some people, but the acknowledgment of history that is one-sided, Eurocentric or incomplete is the first step in combatting these painful historical silences.
Historical silences are broadly created at one of four levels:
· Fact creation (the making of sources)
· Fact assembly (the making of archives)
· Fact retrieval (the making of narratives)
· Retrospective significance (the making of history)
Historical facts never exist in a vacuum, they exist in the contextual narratives that gives the year 1776 or the name ‘Nelson Mandela’ some sort of significance over the year ‘1212’ or the name ‘Arya Dharod’.
Student Spotlight
Katharina Kuehr (Austria)
Let’s begin with a key highlight of your summer break. Talk to us about the experience of working as an engineering research intern at the Harris Lab of Brown University’s School of Engineering. What was the experience like and how did it help you grow?
Let’s rewind a few months before summer officially began. My wonderful Formal Analyses professor, Prof Rios, spoke to us during one class about the interesting research he was conducting in fluid mechanics. My major was still undecided at the time but I’d recently gotten interested in physics, hence I reached out to him and expressed my interest in his research. He offered to supervise me on a project, so together we worked on a project regarding modelling a solid sphere impacting a deformable membrane (a surface that’s not fully solid, like a sofa or bed), which can then be used to calculate the impact area, how much the membrane deforms, and in what way it deforms – this has interesting applications within robotics! I learnt so much about the underlying complex math and methodology that goes into modelling and analysing such a seemingly simple two-second act as dropping a solid sphere on your living room sofa.
One day, Prof Rios asked me about my (very undecided) summer plans. He mentioned a close friend of his at Brown University, Professor Daniel Harris, who was currently working on a fluid mechanics project very similar to ours, and offered to put me in touch. I was delighted and grateful! His colleague was super open to working with me and offered to host me over the summer at Brown. So after an amazing spring semester in San Francisco, I packed up my bags and headed off to Rhode Island, with a curious, open and excited outlook for what the next few months would bring.
At Harris lab, I worked on modelling the impact of a fluid (like a droplet of water) upon hitting a solid surface. Surprising to me, 75% of my work was just programming on my computer and not touching any lab equipment – I worked with Python, Javascript, HTML, C, C++ and more. I even picked up some cutting-edge hardware skills like working with 3D printers, building a ‘droplet generator’, designing circuit boards, and using a laser cutter.
My research can be used in any real-life case that involves tiny drops impacting a solid surface, like modelling the impact of rain on soil, improving crop fertilisers, and analysing cooling systems in aeroplane turbines, which is vital to the machine’s safety and stability.
The most positive aspect of my time at Brown was that the professor and other lab students actually valued my opinion and learning – they would slow down their work to explain to me exactly what they were doing, and consistently give me the freedom and responsibility of making decisions for the project. I picked up a solid mindset of iteration/debugging, as well as allowing my tiny, daily failures to contribute to my learning, growth, and eventual long-term success.
Another interesting tib-bit I learnt was that Brown has the happiest students and the least-toxic atmosphere of any Ivy League, and in fact is above average compared to most US universities, despite its rigour and intensity.
What I really took away from the entire experience is the hope that many years down the line, I can be the mentor that Prof Rios and Prof Harris were to me. I want to be that person who can guide, inspire, and be patient with their mentees and colleagues, focusing on their learning and growth before the project’s overall success.
Speaking of inspiring, what could be more inspiring than project ‘TARATA’, your social impact initiative for the Tanzanian people! Without giving too many fun details away, I’ll hand over the mic to you and allow you to walk us through how you landed up from Austria to working in non-profit in Morogoro, Tanzania…
The name ‘TARATA’ is an acronym in Swahili, which translates to ‘smile from a friend’. I love the name as much today as when we first agreed upon it!
I spent the majority of my gap year after high school in Tanzania, working in social impact and non-profit, a sector I am quite passionate about. I’m aware of the messiness and corruption involved worldwide in the volunteering and NGO space, hence I was looking for an organisation that seemed truly genuine. This led me to Margery Wolf Khun School in the historical town of Bagamoyo, where I worked as a substitute English teacher for their summer programs.
A couple months in, one teacher from the school approached me with his dream of granting accessible education to disabled people in Tanzania, who aren’t served well in a regular classroom, with other students. The teacher wanted to open a training centre to equip such people with the skills and knowledge that could help them live a good life, and find dignified work in society, in the hope of their achieving financial independence.
He had the vision, not the funds. I knew people in the NGO industry back home through my personal network, hence I reached out and began the fundraising process. I encouraged donations from family, friends, colleagues, while also organizing events like charity concerts with my friends. With the initial funds in hand, last year, we opened up the first school for ten hearing impaired students in Morogoro. We developed a 3-year curriculum where our students would learn English, Swahili, math, sign language, basic business knowledge, and sewing/tailoring as their vocational training. We currently are working with two groups of ten students each, with a focus on trying to scale up by connecting to the broader NGO network in Tanzania while simultaneously trying to integrate some computer science and programming skills into our students as a 21st-century life skill.
One key takeaway is the importance of always working with locals in foreign countries because honestly, without my co-founder, I would have struggled immensely to set up the school, because he knew the system so well, for example navigating the politics, paperwork and complex systems of the non-profit sector in Tanzania.
I also strongly believe that our perception and language need to be changed when talking about these students with special needs – we must consider them as having ‘special needs’ rather than being ‘disabled’, which has a negative connotation in our society. Our systems need to change in a way that grants everyone, regardless of their needs and circumstances, access to education that truly works for them.
The most gratifying aspect of social work is seeing the positive contribution you make in someone’s life journey. Hearing from students how much they enjoyed coming to school, seeing their passion for wearing the clothes they made themselves, seeing them stay back after school to interact with their friends or teachers, truly put the widest smile on my face.
Content creation and powerful ideas are another fabulous way to create a positive impact in our communities, locally and globally. We know about your technical brilliance and mathematical genius Katie, now let’s shift 180 degrees and talk about your artistic side through the Feelfood club blog and recipe book.
I’ve always had an intense and passionate relationship with food (both positive and negative). As a child, I used to love trying new cuisines and dishes, often preferring to order the weirdest or most unfamiliar items on the menu at any restaurant. Due to various reasons, when I was 12, I developed anorexia which had a significant impact on my life by turning my intense passion into a very difficult relationship with food. As I started recovery, I went to boarding school where the cafeteria food honestly wasn’t great, so a few friends and I collectively decided to take up cooking. Teaching myself this science and art of cooking helped me work out a healthier relationship with food and my body.
The following summer break, I started my food blog, where I shared my passion for healthy cooking and healthy living, with my new insights about the power of food to not only affect your body but also your mind and heart.
During Covid, I had time to develop even more healthy recipes at home while simultaneously improving my photography skills, which had the effect of social media growth and a growing number of people who got to know me through various online platforms. I was then approached by a big, popular Mediterranean restaurant in my city to the launch of their cookbook, and I subsequently became their social media ambassador. I created recipes for them, made videos and photoshoots of their restaurants, and promoted their brand on my Instagram. Fortunately for me, this restaurant is well known nation-wide, so my work here garnered the interest of the largest supermarket chain in Austria, SPAR, who reached out to me with the offer of joining their recipe creation program.
Simultaneously, another Austrian social media influencer reached out to me with the proposal to collaborate on an e-book of healthy recipes. I was thrilled and accepted the offer! Once we agreed upon an idea and action plan, we got to work creating fun vegan recipes like burgers from banana peels, chocolate mousse out of tofu, pasta with nut sauce, vegan salmon out of carrots, etc. The intention was to think outside the box and come up with something innovative and fun, which informed the subsequent book title, ‘Not Just Salad’.
The biggest takeaway was to never let myself be taken advantage of as a 14/15 year old girl – I learnt how to be taken seriously, how to avoid being misused by collaborators, and the importance of setting boundaries and expectations on projects with clear standards for my self-image, especially my reputation on social media.
While I struggled with it when I was being active on social media, this journey also taught me to detach my self-worth from external success (the number of likes, views, or comments on my posts). Some healthy distinction between the work you do and who you are as a human being, is really important for your mental health!
The entire experience showed me that there are people out there who share my struggles, my niche passions, and curiosities, my values and beliefs, whom I can collaborate with on interesting projects with real-world impact and more importantly, who I can create lasting relationships and friendships with.
Book of the month
Movie of the month
Poem of the month
A task too large
Forgive me, my son
For I have left behind for you
A task too large
The task of rebuilding
This broken, dying, grey planet
The task of returning
The fish to their rivers
The trees to their forests
The corals to the sea
The task of bringing back
Most creatures from near extinction
And rebuilding all their habitats
Most of which are
Dead, doomed and destroyed
The task of cleaning up
The polluted lakes
The filthy air
And the morally corrupt souls
Of our egoistic and stupid species
The task of bringing back
Some life
Some colour
Some diversity
Some humanity
(whatever that big word means)
To this mess of a planet
That we have made
I know, my son
I know it is a task too large
A heavy burden
Weighing on your soft shoulders
But I must remind you,
What choice do you have?
Wow! That was long. Thank you for patiently reading (or impatiently skimming) to the end.
Please subscribe to my monthly newsletter if you would like to stay updated on my monthly adventures as I travel to six global cities (San Francisco, Taipei, Seoul, Buenos Aires, Hyderabad and Berlin) over the next three years with Minerva University. Until then, Au revoir!
PS. Spotted a handsome young man at Taipei 101 (the tallest tower in Taiwan)…