"Lucky girl," the woman said, nudging me for a bite. "You must get a lot of attention, doesn't she boys?"
This woman in the visa line with us at the Saigon airport had an assurance in her voice that, for a second, made me believe she was right. But then I snapped back to reality.
Last year I abandoned all comfort and familiarity when I left on the first day of the New Year to study abroad in Singapore. While my best friends and roommates had chosen destinations from Italy to England, for some inexplicable reason my gut was pulling me East. Up until this pivotal point in my life, I'd spent 20 years cocooned within a women-run alternative universe. Attending an all-girls institution for fourteen years was as women-centric and female empowering as it gets, so growing up I moved through my warped female-dominated society with confidence and ease. My world was all female by virtue of my high school experience but also because of my choices. I felt most comfortable around women because they were all I’d ever known, so naturally my closest friends in college were the girls in my sorority. At every stage of growth, I continued to find myself in a community oozing with girl power because it was constructive, inspirational, and self-assuring.
Then, I decided to go to Singapore. Without soundly knowing another soul, I somehow found my way into a solid friend group: it was Tim, Joe, Adam, and I, a.k.a. I was the only girl. And unlike the picture-perfect fantasy imagined by the woman in Saigon, my time amongst the boys didn't quite play out like a romantic comedy.
I always knew gender inequality occurred, but I didn't grasp it until I experienced it. My four months abroad amongst exclusively male company was the first time I'd seen how women are treated differently for nothing more than the fact that they are women. Between the competition in the boys’ club, my singular female voice, and the tendency to people please, I shriveled up within my own skin and haven't been able to quite grow back since.
My capstone is then a reflective collection that looks back at my time in Singapore. In retrospect, this experience was one that I never really stomached. I looked back at it, tried to ignore it and move past it, but I never really came to terms with the lessons it taught me and how it changed me. As I prepare to graduate and enter the workforce, my goal of being successful in the entertainment industry speaks directly to the lessons I need to extract from this experience. Gearing up for a career in a male-dominated industry, I want to learn from my mistakes and equip myself for battle. With help from filmmaker and professor Jen Proctor, journalist and Wallace House director Lynette Clemetson, and CEO and President of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra Anne Parsons, I was able to accomplish this. As a result, this project has helped me close these sorrowful chapters of my life in a way that allows me to mine the important lessons within them. I can walk away from it with the stride back in my step.
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