CEP Reflection Essay

As I reflect upon my time in this crazy major called Community, Environment, and Planning, the first thing I felt was that the past two years have flown by. It feels like yesterday that, with an air of anticipation and the excitement of going back in person, that I, all masked up, entered Gould at 8 in the morning for CEP 301.

Unlike many other people, I've had a long (ish) history with the CEP major. All the way back in early 2019, when I was still a high school student, as I was ending my junior year, I was searching up the various urban planning programs in colleges. At the time, I was pretty certain that my top school was UW, and so, I stumbled upon the CEP program under the College of Built Environments website. At the time, I was surprised at the name: Community, Environment, and Planning. What on Earth does that entail?

At that time, and for a long time preceding it, I was fairly certain that I wanted to be an urban planner when I'm done with school. My impression of urban planning as a discipline came from raking up hundreds of hours in Cities: Skylines, riding (a little too much) the local (Port Angeles is local, right?) public transportation, as well as looking through various local publications and blogs. I thought to myself that transportation planning is just so cool, and honestly, as someone who has grown up in Beijing and Singapore, I had a lot of things to say about the tragic condition of the urban form in the United States.

But anyways, I still remember soon after, I met with Megan in the monolithic concrete building known as Gould Hall. She was probably a bit surprised by me, at the time still a high school student stumbling into her office. But I was introduced to the structure of CEP, and how the major runs, and what the graduates do.

From here, I continued into my senior year of high school, and then of course, 2020 happened. As someone who was originally from China, I heard about the coronavirus earlier than most, as well as seeing the effects of it as it quickly swept through my home country. Just months after, in the first week of March 2020, I was in Portland, Oregon, attending what was soon to be my last cheer competition of the 19-20 season. The day prior, my classes at Bellevue College were moved online. My cheer gym announced that all competitors would be allowed to arrive close to our competition time, and that we did not need to attend our awards ceremonies in order to reduce exposure.

On that Saturday evening, I received my UW results: I was waitlisted.

From that point on, the next few months of Covid restrictions felt like a fever dream to me. I spent lots of time driving around in the region, driving through the State Parks, through the Cascades… But anyways, I continued on, I applied to CEP as a part of the cohort of 2022, as I had enough credits at the time from Running Start, I was not accepted. I also sent in videos as part of virtual tryouts for UW cheer, but I was rejected.

As summer was approaching, I appealed against my waitlist decision, and I was accepted into the UW via my appeal. This was perhaps a high point for me during 2020, and I knew that I cannot squander away my opportunity to attend the school.

I entered UW in the Fall of 2020, I took CEP 200 with Keith, and fell in love with the mini-facilitations and discussions that we did, despite being on Zoom. It was at this time that I also declared Geography as my major, just to have a backup. I quickly realized that I really enjoyed my coursework in GIS, mapping, and various forms of data analysis. After applying and being accepted into CEP for the class of 2023, I decided to keep Geography as a double major.

After this long detour into memory lane…I met my classmates for the first time, in person, during CEP orientation before school started. To be honest, I was definitely a bit intimidated by everyone, but it was simply so nice to be socializing with a couple dozen people after most of 2020.

I think over the entire two years of CEP, I witnessed a lot of personal growth within myself. Thinking back to the first quarters of Junior Year, I think I am now quite different. I think I have grown a lot more accustomed to participating in discussions, especially as a part of CAPP, as well as simply being more confident, I think, in general.

For the past two years, I have been a member of CAPP, or the committee on academic policies & procedures. I joined at the insistence of a CEPster that was the class of 2022, and to be honest, I didn’t really have any other strong reasons to join. However, I think that CAPP provided me with a lot of opportunities in “soft skills”, and I eventually took over as one of the Co-Points of CAPP for this past year. While the committee has been one of the smaller ones, and one that is in some ways, a bit boring, relative to the others, I felt like we did good work that I was proud of. Of course, I also have to note the countless games of GeoGuessr that we played as a committee activity.

Within the small community of CEP, I not only learned, and defined what the heck community is, but I was also able to form friendships and connections in this community. I felt supported and encouraged by my friends in the major, and once again, I felt like my time in CEP was just too damn short.

CEP for the past two years has been something that I could've relied on that was, for the lack of a better term, normal. I have had a pretty unusual, and I suppose, “exciting” life, and being able to have this group of peers in an academic setting, and to have something to tether onto while I navigated life was something that I took for granted. To see everyone, bleary-eyed, at 8:30 in the morning three times a week was nice: it was consistent and it didn't change.

After the craziness and the sense of being rejected, and being lost that I felt at the beginning of the covid pandemic, to now, where I am about to be done with CEP, with a senior project that I feel strongly about, as well as having participated a good amount in the major, I am satisfied with my two years in CEP, and I wouldn't have changed a thing.