I have many different social identites that have shaped me. Being a female, especially in the male-dominated field of STEM, has pushed me to be confident and outspoken. But, it has also made me victim to sexist remarks and stereotypes that are harmful to my self esteem. Nevertheless, I will continue to pursue a future in STEM field and work to create an equal, safe environment for everyone. Furthermore, my race has significantly affected me. My racial identity–half white and half Korean– doesn't have an assigned racial group dedicated to it. This means that I am never accepted by the Asian community, but not fully accepted by the white community. Growing up with this was confusing and difficult to understand. This has taught me how important diversity is to fully expose everyone to different backgrounds and experience so we all can feel accepted. Having a Korean mother also exposes me to the racism that people experience and has taught me to speak up for equality and justice. However, I do acknowledge my privilege of being half-white and looking more like my white dad. This has granted me privilege while growing up and sheltered me from the racism that my mom has experienced. I also acknowledge my social and economic privilege of growing up in a safe, educated town and having easy access to education. This pushes me to advocate for those who do not have my privilege in hope that we all one day can have equal opportunities to succeed. Overall, all my social identities culminate to make me who I am.

At this moment, I define academic success as my grades and performance on tests or papers. I would ideally like to redefine academic success to be my understanding of the class’s material and mastering of skills or concepts rather than just my letter grades. Defining my academic success as my grades has been damaging to my mental health as sometimes letter grades do not fully reflect how well I learned in a class. This leads to frustration and stress on wanting to get a certain grade rather than wanting to fully learn and understand concepts. Furthermore, this leads to me cramming for tests and just temporarily memorizing things rather than actually learning them. All the temporary memorization not only sets me up for failure in the future since I do not remember anything from the class, but it also makes me feel as if learning and school are pointless since I do not retain anything from my classes. Moreover, it makes learning less enjoyable, which it should be and I know it can be. All of these reasons are why I am trying and will continue to try to redefine academic success in my life to rely less on my letter grades. I know this will take a long time since I have been defining academic success on my grades my whole life, but I hope to soon shift my perspective through reframing and reminding myself what the importance of truly learning is.