|Let me give you my card.| Last night I and the other admitted NYU students were all invited to a dinner at the Twenty Four Fifth Ballroom. It was NYU's BLAPA's (Black Latin and Asian Pacific Americans) Annual Spring Dinner. There was wining and there was certainly dining. There had actually been wining and dining throughout most of the day,along with several events that coalesced my decision into crystal clarity: I will be at NYU in the fall. The interview for the An-Bryce scholars was on Thursday. I've basically been doing NYU things since Wednesday night (hotel, fancy dinner here, fancier dinner there, meets and greets, schmoozing and boozing). All of the interviewees I met were incredible people and I can't imagine it's going to be an easy task to pick who should win amongst us. The scholarship was initiated and endowed by an amazing man -- Anthony Welters. He's black, he had to work 30hrs a week while putting himself through NYU law school in the late 70s, and now he's in a position to give back. His most recent giving back? A $10m grant to NYU. When we and the other interviewees had a bull-session with him and the Dean of the school, Dean Revesz, he posed the question: "What would you do if money was not a problem? If all you had to do, was perform/do well academically, and not worry about how you were going to pay for your laptop because your old one just crashed or whether or not there was going to be food on the table next week, what would you do?" The scholarship is designed to get at those with "disadvantaged" backgrounds. I feared that it was going the same was as schools looking for "diversity." But the only thing we all really had in common was that growing up was tough, but we came from differents parts of the country and different ethnic and national origins. I think the fact that NYU has a program like this, that walks the talk of affording opportunities speaks so well for it. Beyond this program, NYU guarantees a $4k grant to anyone who does non-profit work during their summers. $4k is not much, but it's something. Other schools, like Penn, offer you nothing. Or, at Michigan, the students raise the funds themselves through what they call "Student Funded Fellowships." The whole student body is charged with the task of raising non-profit internship funding, only it's only about $3k and only 1/3 of students who apply are actually given it. So many schools talk of doing so many things, but I really feel like NYU is doing them. Back to the dinner. I, of course, brought my social maven and surrogate mother, Michelle, and it was great. And toward the end of the evening, a lawyer we'd been talking to came over to us and explained that going where I was going, I would meet a number of people who could be mentors to me, who would be eager to be mentors to me, I only needed to ask. "Let me give you my card," he said. I think I'm entering a period where I'm going to be getting a lot of cards. I do not know that I've ever been more jazzed for small, rectangular, rigid pieces of paper.
I went to an Ivy League undergrad.
I go to a top NYC law school.
I date men (well...).
I live in Bed-Stuy.
I don't need more to say,
just more room to say it.
Etc.