This interview has been collected and condensed by Kelly Lin-Kremer.

Class of 2022, History

Tell me a little bit about yourself, where you grew up, and what you're doing now.

I was born in New York, but we moved around a lot because of my dad's job, so I lived in Asia and the UK for a bit, and then spent middle school and high school back in New York.

I studied history at Princeton in undergrad and graduated in 2022. After that I did a short stint in marketing and some other things, but ultimately came back to teaching and tutoring. Right now I'm working with this group in New York that teaches SAT classes at schools in New York and New Jersey that are generally underfunded and have students that wouldn't be able to afford SAT prep classes. I worked in South Korea this past summer, doing college essay prep, research, writing, and teaching with students who are hoping to study in the US after high school.

I'm gearing up to move to Atlanta in a couple of weeks to start a master's program at Candler, which is part of Emory University. The program is a master’s of theological studies, but I'm hoping to continue to apply a historical lens and take a lot of history of Christianity classes with an eye towards immigrant churches in the US, as well as study the relationship between politics and theology.

What led you to history at Princeton?

I applied to Princeton to be in SPIA because I thought I was going to be a diplomat. Then I realized very quickly that it's just not in my personality.

I came into Princeton with a pretty strong background already in critical race theory and theories of power because I had done debate in high school, and I think that they are pretty good about training students in that. For a while I was toying with the idea of doing Anthropology, African American Studies, or Asian American Studies, something that's a little bit more theory-oriented.

Professor Lew-Williams was teaching HIS 280: Approaches to American History. I really enjoyed the process of putting together a story from different primary sources. There's so much interpretive work that goes into how you tell a story, and how you tell a story is so influenced by what you already believe, and what you choose to allow yourself to see in the archive.

I also took an archives class with Professor Joshua Guild, and I was very compelled by this idea of history as precarious and nuanced. It seemed like a really interesting intellectual challenge.

Then COVID and the Black Lives Matter movement happened, and I could see the centrality of history, and why it's so important for us to know these things in order to be rooted in a current politics that is very cognizant of the history that we're coming from. I think that was the final nail in the coffin for me.

What were some of the best courses that you took in history?

One of the most memorable was Professor Beth Lew-Williams’ Asian American History. There's so much material to cover. I thought it was so incredible how much breadth we covered, as well as how much depth we were able to go into. It was very edifying to learn about that history in a formal context.

I also took The History of Christianity in Africa with Professors Jack Tannous and Jacob Dlamini. That was such an incredible class, not only because the two of them are so incredible as scholars, but because they're also both very thoughtful with the way that they talk about historical subjects. There was such a strong clarity in the way that class is taught, where you have to be aware of histories of colonialism and slavery and missionaries and all these other things when we're talking about Christianity in Africa.

But we also can't use those histories to over-determine or erase the agency of the people in Africa themselves, which they exercised over the course of the years of slavery, colonialism, and post-colonialism. Their agency implicated their interactions with Christianity and challenged the Western presumptions that we have around Christianity as a religion that exists primarily in the global West.

Professors Dlamini and Tannous treated historical subjects with such compassion and with such affordance for their full humanity, not only when we were talking about people who were the subjects or objects of oppression, but also people who perpetuated these systems of oppression. What do we lose from our history when we also don't afford them their full humanity? And what do we gain in terms of our perspective when we bring that perspective back in? It was just a lovely class. The two of them working together was just such a wonderful pairing.

What was your thesis about?

I wrote my thesis about a Korean American megachurch in New York that started in the seventies. I did a case study of this church to think through the dynamics of Korean American church spaces and the Korean immigrant community in New York through the end of the twentieth century.

It is actually the church that I grew up in, which was a point of caution. Professor Lew-Williams was my adviser, and she cautioned me about doing a history that is so personal. But I think the thesis really did ask a lot of questions about immigrant community and the church as an immigrant space. How much of the theology that then came out of these spaces was implicated by the immigrant experience, by the missionizing experience from the Korean Peninsula, and by being a people of diaspora?

I'm so glad that I had Professor Lew-Williams as my adviser on that because she's just so vastly knowledgeable about all things, even things that are not necessarily within her particular area of study.

I definitely wish that I had gone deeper into the existing sort of secondary source literature around immigrant churches and immigrant theologies, but I think that feeling that I wish I had learned more about this thing is probably part of what compelled me into grad school. 

What did you do after Princeton? What is your vision for the master’s?

There was always a part of me that knew I wanted to go to grad school, and I wanted to pursue something in academia or academia-adjacent.

I think after graduation, there was this pressure around, Can I hold down an office job? Can I hack it in the real world? I gave it my best shot, and ultimately I decided I want to pursue the things that I love and am well equipped to do.

I’m doing a master’s of theology, but the long-term vision is to pursue a Ph.D. in history or religion. Candler is a seminary, and I don't really imagine myself staying in the seminary world of things, but I did want to get a strong religious education first, because I feel like I don't have the intellectual tools to really understand religious history.

I love research and writing, and I would love to write forever. I also really love teaching, and so I'm hoping that this path will pan out to some kind of teaching and research position somewhere. But I also know that things are pretty hard in academia right now, so I’m keeping an eye to the nonprofit world.

There's a nonprofit that I'm working with down in Atlanta while I'm doing my master’s that focuses on bringing theological education to local congregations and pushing some of these more difficult questions in an intellectual setting in these churches, with people who maybe are not interested in going to seminary, but who want to be equipped to think through some of the more difficult questions of faith and politics. So that is also something that I'm very passionate about and open to if the Ph.D. doesn’t really work out.

Have you discovered any new interests or passions after graduating from Princeton?

Prior to graduating, I only ever taught in one-on-one tutoring settings or maybe four students at most in small group settings, but I've been teaching these SAT classes in large classroom settings, with maybe 35 high schoolers. At first, it was very overwhelming, but I think that it's been a very humbling experience. There is such a unique energy to a classroom or a lecture setting that's been really exciting.

I also started running. I never once stepped into Dillon Gym at Princeton, and I hated even the walk from my dorm to Charter Eating Club, which was like 15 minutes. I got into running as a meditative thing without any specific goals. It's just a thing that I want to do to enjoy. I am a very goal-oriented person, and I love that about myself, but I felt very much like I needed to do something in my life that I did not need to get better at, and I did not need to work towards anything.

What were some of the biggest lessons you learned post-graduation?

It really feels like it has been at once more than two years, and then also just a month since I've graduated.

One of the biggest things for me personally has just been about figuring out my values and realizing that I can't spend the rest of my life trying to prove something to someone else, or trying to prove things to other people.

Coming out of a school like Princeton, there is this implicit pressure around having a very stunning career. In the last two years I've really just made my peace with the idea. Not that I think that I won't have a stunning career because life is long and I work hard, but I realized I'm never going to feel free to pursue the things that really matter to me if I keep holding onto that question in the back of my head: How does this look to other people?

It was hard after graduating, feeling like I should do something impressive first, before I go pursue this thing that I care about a lot. There is wisdom in that, and I respect people who do that right in their twenties. But I just think for me, I've had to learn a lot about sticking to my guns and realizing that part of being in your twenties is learning how to make decisions for your life, come what may.

There's not as much scaffolding anymore, where people tell you what decisions will work out or not work out. Through a lot of that anxiety, I think I've learned I need to make decisions, and then I need to make my peace with them. And if things go wrong, I need to trust that I can make more decisions in the future to self-correct.

What advice would you give to current history majors or people thinking about majoring in history?

This is such a cliché piece of advice, but talk to your professors. There's so many things I love about my Princeton experience, like the friends and the opportunities. But I feel so indelibly changed by the professors that I met and the things that I learned from them and the ways that they influenced my life, not just on an intellectual level, but just as people and the amount of respect that I have for them.

I feel like I did not go to office hours enough to just talk about things, and to connect with them, not just as my professors, but as people. They have such interesting, rich lives and experiences and perspectives on the world, on politics. There's so many wonderful people who have so many wonderful things to bring into someone's life beyond just their syllabi and their course of study. It is the thing that I am the most jealous of, that students still have the opportunity to engage in those kinds of conversations and have such easy access to such brilliant people.

Then the other advice would be, the thing that I loved about the History Department is it's so easy to find something that you enjoy, because there's so many different areas and kinds of history. 

I know Princeton is a very stressful place. You have your JP and your thesis and all of that, and it is very stressful and daunting, and you’re job searching, you're thinking about your future. But to the extent that one can, it is so important to really just enjoy these classes and enjoy the time. This might be the last time that you are in a classroom like this, and so enjoy it for what it is, even if it's something that you never want to do again, to still enjoy it for the unique thing that it is in the timeline of your life.