For the longest time, I never felt super lucky. Sure, I managed to beat out 85 percent of other super qualified applicants to get admitted to Northwestern, and I could attend because I won a generous scholarship from the government back home in Singapore. But it’s never easy to feel lucky about the mundane and humdrum of everyday life here. When, within this year alone, I somehow managed to sprain my right ankle and inflame my left tendon all within a month (right before and over Spring Break!), missed a Purple Tie Affair invite because it landed in my spam folder and got shut out of a class I longed to take by literally two seconds, my first reaction was never to say, “Hey, never mind about these little things because I'm so lucky to go here.”

Part of the reason why it’s easy to feel unlucky is that luck is intimately tied with privilege. Life chances and social positions shape our prospects in subtle yet powerful ways. I knew my life at Northwestern was easier in certain ways that are harder for some of my peers – I’ve lived on a comfortable budget and haven’t faced any problems academically – and I deeply appreciate that. But in a college campus with students from incredibly varied backgrounds, it’s been all too easy to compare myself against others who’re a little bit more equipped, a little more endowed in ways I’m not. As a first generation college student, I could never really turn to my parents for guidance for anything from picking a second major or planning the logistics of sublets, because my parents – separated by ten thousand miles and a cultural gulf perhaps wider than that – didn’t know anything about life as a college student in the U.S. It has always been disheartening to attend career fairs and realize that the chances of anyone with a foreign passport being hired in the journalism industry were slim to none, although I hope to pursue a long-term career in journalism here.

It’s too easy to feel covetous or jealous when faced with situations when I feel a little less advantaged than some of my peers. But I’ve found that giving to others in my community has proved an effective antidote for those feelings. When I first started running Asian American Student Journalists at Northwestern, I felt a tinge of sadness that I would personally never get even a shot at some of the job opportunities I was promoting to my peers. But when I met up with some people I was matched with for a mentorship program, I found myself genuinely wanting to help others achieve success, even if I didn’t qualify for all the options they had. As cheesy as it sounds, counting my blessings has helped. Over time in college, I received multiple care packages from home that attracted stares in the mailroom, their size and generosity representing all the ways my parents wanted to support me in the ways they could. My dad may speak primarily Mandarin, but that doesn’t stop him from Googling my name, reading all my stories on his janky old laptop in a language he isn’t the best at, and randomly catching me off-guard by quoting my tweets to me (Hi, Dad!).

Luck is only part of the story in success. Many possibilities are made possible only by sheer hard work and in a stressed out, over-achieving campus culture, we need to remember to give credit to ourselves for that. In the summer of my sophomore year, I suddenly decided to pick up a double major in economics. This could have barely been possible if not for all my high school credits and the fact that a few days prior to my snap decision, Medill had informed us all by email that we could now use our summer internship to fulfill our journalism residency requirement, freeing up an extra quarter for me to get my econ requirements done. But achieving that still involved the horror of surviving econometrics and many a dreary day in office hours in Kellogg fighting losing battles against the bell curve. Just my luck, too, that my spring quarters midterms always somehow seemed to fall during the sunniest days of the year. As I wrap up my last two econ classes, I'm reminded that luck was the little spark that got the engine going, but I wouldn’t have reached this goal if I hadn’t put in the effort too.

Still, I’m amazed by the serendipity that comes with the college experience. I’ve felt disappointed and betrayed at times by people I trusted. Recently, I called up a close friend in tears because it’d happened again, from a driving instructor of all people. I asked him why it felt in that moment that I attracted people who seemed to end up hurting me. He reassured me that I just had bad luck, and that it didn’t reflect on who I was as a person. When I got off the phone, I suddenly remembered how we met – we were both late double majors in econ and found ourselves taking the same intermediate classes as juniors, surrounded by a sea of sophomores. Over the summer after our junior year, we discovered that we needed to both be in the same area in Chicago for our summer internships by the same start time and began taking the train together. We bonded over too many snapchats of him sleeping on the CTA and late night problem set sessions and stumbled into a close, trusting friendship we never expected would materialize. During my time in college I may have been hurt by the friendships gone awry and unhealthy relationships, but they’ve also led me to be more introspective and reconnect with the ideals I have about the kind of person I aspire to be and where my priorities lie, and they’ve also led me to seek more suitable companions and more importantly, be a better friend to those in my life.

So maybe sometimes I’ve been unlucky in my college experiences, but luck’s worked in my favor wonderfully too. “Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise,” a quote by W.B. Yeats reads. I see myself, the soon-to-be graduate, as the product of all the chance interactions and connections that have come my way - the editor-in-chief who convinced me to join North by Northwestern at my first student publications fair, the upstairs neighbor turned close confidant and later roommate, the senior editor with the kindness to give me heads ups about career opportunities, the professor who selected me to go on an all-expenses paid trip to a Paris conference my sophomore year. In that sense, I’ve been truly touched by grace and fortitude to have met so many kind souls who’ve knowingly or not supported me and given me so many opportunities to achieve my potential. As I graduate, I feel lucky, but more importantly, I also feel loved, capable, confident and strong - and ready, more than ever, to pay it forward.