Have you heard of My CC Journey? EIC Jenny Zhu certainly has.My CC Journey is that one initiative that Dean Valentini and CCSC sent 12390 emails about upon launch in spring 2018, describing it as a “tool designed to encourage students to reflect and assess their ongoing personal development.”

It facilitates this so-called reflection through a website outlining 13 skills, stylized as “Core Competencies,” that are encouraged for students to develop throughout their time here; there’s also a space on the site to share a 75 to 100-word reflection or story about one specific experience that had developed one of these skills.

But why limit ourselves to only 75 or 100 words? As a CC student, I felt that most of the college experiences in which I had developed these key skills could not be encapsulated in mere words. In reflecting on My CC Journey, I felt that I needed to turn to a more escalated art form: the TikTok.

Civic and Individual Responsibility – Calling Hartley Hospitality because you went into the single-use bathroom during the second week of school and the door handle just completely fell off

Research – Looking over five (5) lines of your assigned reading and using it to create an entire 9-page essay with a thesis statement that is only tangentially related

Community Engagement and Inclusion – Telling a girl in the Mel’s bathroom that you love her and her top SO much, like, you’ve NEVER loved anything more

Creativity and Innovation – Trying to pull together an outfit for a “beach/summer” theme party from your tiny John Jay closet, all in the dead of a 15 degree winter

Critical Thinking – Taking an unopened bottle of hot sauce, a salt shaker, four bananas, two coffee cups filled to the brim with gummy bears, and one slushie to go to concoct your next seven meals

Global Awareness – New York bodegas in the earliest hours of the morning

Information and Technological Literacy – Spending an hour on TikTok, the chosen medium of the zoomer elite, scrolling through all your favorite users to write a Bwog post that isn’t even that good

Knowledge – Falsely pretending that you knew something about religion after being assigned readings from The Oxford Annotated Bible in not one, but two, whole core classes

Written Communication – Sitting down to write your weekly discussion post, realizing that your last four discussion posts all began with “Going off of that”

Oral Communication – Sitting through an argument between that one white boy in CC and the rest of the entire class, unsure how to best contribute

Quantitative Literacy – Being forced to take multivariable calculus again despite proclaiming your senior year of high school that you would “never take another pure math class ever again”

Teamwork and Collaboration – When you complete the entirety of the group project by your lonesome self the Wednesday night before it’s due, because “but Senior Night is good this week!” and “oh my god, did you hear they’re gonna have a champagne toast at midnight?”

Wellness and Resilience – Attempting to navigate the half-melted pools of gray slushy water accumulating next to the curb as you cross the street

Photo via Bwogger