One of my closest friends at UCLA is Eva Mak, who is graduating this week after being a Bruin for three years. She is going to the University of Chicago Law School this fall. Here are some words from her on graduating and the future.



It’s very hard for me to say what I am going through at the moment. It feels like I just started college, and now it seems that I may never come back to the place I have called home for the last three years. I have grown so much from the time I started at UCLA.

College here is kind of the interim period between your childhood and reality. On one hand, you’re making decisions on your own, and on the other, you are surrounded by a campus community that literally holds your hand through all the adult decisions and experiences you may encounter.

I feel like I have been faced with a choice in college. I could have taken the easy route, enrolled in the easiest classes and the most practical major while finding a decent job after college near my hometown. But I didn’t. I tried one of the hardest majors, took the hardest courses, created events and ideas and contributed towards reforming UCLA as a target school for employers.

I have found that I had to break through my protective bubble if I were to experience and make something of myself in the world. And that is what scares me the most about the future. I am forgoing the familiar, the comfortable, the easy and most common routes to forge my own future.

I’ll be in a foreign city again with people I have never met before in an academically rigorous environment with no certainties. I will be alone and lost, it'll be a sink or swim environment. I do not know where I will be in the next five years, but that’s the beauty of it.

I am so convinced that I am meant to do something great in this world that I am willing to risk the familiar to achieve whatever that might be. I am sad to leave the place where I was able to transform myself into a productive member of society, but the future holds greatness and I’m excited to head wherever that leads me.