My Classroom
The World Was My Classroom Before I Ever Left the Bay
I was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, but I wasn’t well traveled. No gap years backpacking through Europe. No family vacations stamped across a passport. My childhood map was BART lines, 880 traffic, and the way the fog hits Twin Peaks at 5pm.
But my mother made sure my worldview was bigger than my zip code.
She introduced me to the beauty of different religions and cultures before I could spell them. We broke fast with Muslim neighbors during Ramadan and ate sticky rice cake at Tết with our Vietnamese friends. She took me to Sunday service at Glide Memorial, then to a Buddhist meditation in Berkeley the next week. Not to convert me. To show me. She taught me that faith isn’t a fence — it’s a window. And there’s more than one way to look at the light.
That foundation mattered when I got the chance to attend school in Copenhagen, Denmark. For the first time, I was the foreigner. I was the one with the accent. I sat in classrooms with students from Kenya, Ukraine, South Korea, and had to explain “the Bay Area” to people who’d never heard of Oakland, only San Francisco. They asked me about American healthcare, gun laws, race. They didn’t ask from Fox News or textbooks. They asked from lived experience. And I realized: you can grow up in the most diverse region in America and still have blind spots. Copenhagen didn’t give me a global perspective. It pressure-tested the one my mother already started.
I’m thankful my education has been wide, not just tall. It started in Head Start, where I learned to share blocks with kids whose parents spoke Farsi, Tagalog, Spanish, and Ebonics in the same circle time. It moved through public schools that were both affluent and diverse — where my lab partner’s dad built apps, and my best friend’s mom cleaned the buildings those apps were built in. That’s a curriculum you can’t buy.
When four-year college wasn’t the right first step, I went to community colleges and trade schools in business. I learned bookkeeping next to single moms and returning vets. I learned that profit and ethics aren’t enemies, and that a business plan is useless if you can’t talk to people. Those rooms taught me humility. Not every lesson comes with a syllabus.
Now I’m at a college that feels more well-rounded than anywhere I’ve been. My instructors come from Ivy League schools and UC Berkeley. But they don’t lecture down. They teach up. They hand you critical thinking, not just content. They’ll ask, “Who benefits if you believe that?” and then wait while you squirm your way to your own answer. The teaching is diverse — not just in race or gender, but in method. One professor uses case studies from Nigeria. Another brings in labor history from the Central Valley. Nothing is taught in a vacuum.
So no, I’m not well traveled. Not yet. But I’ve been well taught. The Bay Area gave me diversity as a default. My mother gave me culture as a practice. Copenhagen gave me perspective as a responsibility. Head Start gave me the alphabet and the idea that I belonged in a room. Community college and trade school gave me skills that pay bills and respect for labor. And this college, with its Ivy and Berkeley minds, gave me critical thinking — the one tool that lets you take all the rest and actually use it.
I didn’t need a passport to get a global education. I needed a mother who opened doors, teachers who didn’t gatekeep, and a hometown where the world was already in the grocery line with me. For that, I’m thankful.
The Bay raised me. The world shaped me. And I’m still learning.
