Senior Coordinator of Student Employment & Career Counselor at California Lutheran University.Higher education professional with 4+ Years of Experience in Student Affairs, Financial Aid, and Career Services. My passion is to work in a counseling or outreach-oriented role, assisting students and connecting with external partners and institutional stakeholders. My background in financial education, residence life, and financial aid has led to my current work in career advising and student employment. My extensive experience in teaching, counseling, and presenting to diverse student populations on topics such as personal finance, financial aid, and career success has helped me develop a holistic understanding of student needs and higher education. [from his Linkedin profile]. Edward joined Cal Lu in April 2020 as a counselor at Financial Aid.
[Originally posted on April 28, 2021]
This COVID pandemic has decisively made everything unprecedentedly challenging and bad for us to keep up with our work virtually, not to mention how we have tried to get through every day with social distancing. It has been an uninspiring year if not just demoralizing and downright miserable to most everyone of us at Cal Lu. But, what would it be like to even start your new position at Cal Lu during the pandemic when the entire campus and the community was on lockdown?
How would you even start your first day online? Was that in your own living room or at your dinner table? Did you dress up for your first day? Were you welcomed by your colleagues in your department on Zoom? Did you even get a virtual tour around campus?
To get a glimpse of what it might look like, I asked Edward Kang, who started his position as a Financial Aid Counselor in April 2020 during campus lockdown, if he would kindly share his experience with us. (OK. I knew he would probably not be able to say NO to my invite, knowing that he had only met a handful of colleagues over a year, not even in person.)
I asked Edward what his friends would want to know about his experience at Cal Lu this past year in hopes of getting some honest, unedited responses.
Edward: My first year at Cal Lu would best be defined as “leaning into discomfort”. Without a feel for the campus community, I was thrust into the deep end of a highly technical and complex field that was on shifting sands, as COVID-19 forced the financial aid world to adapt to new realities as it did for all of us. What I learned today could be outdated the very next day, and what I believed to be improbable could happen with little to no warning. Early on, I was starved for human connection, so training sessions became opportunities to get to know people, and I had to actively take the time to ask someone to check-in or to get to know someone from a different unit. Relationship-building would not happen spontaneously, but that just meant I had to be intentional and present in all of the moments I did get to spend with people. No checking my phone or answering emails, or else I would miss something important. All in all, it was humbling, challenging, and unpredictable, but I am glad that I found people that have my back and genuinely care about me. I never expected that to happen, but I am so grateful for the compassion and empathy of the CLU family.
Let me try and be a bit more specific.
The moment I knew I was supported came at a completely random time, at the end of a busy workday in the middle of an inundated work week. When things get overwhelming, I fall into a bad habit of pushing myself to try to meet the next deadline, get the next email written, and process the next document. It’s all-consuming, and the work never stops. I was sitting in my living room, juggling phone calls and spreadsheets for what felt like an eternity, and unknowingly suffocating under the endless barrage of tasks and projects. Gradually, I could feel my vision narrowing and my mind going blank as I felt anxiety and desperation bubbling up as the clock inched closer to 5 PM. As the least experienced person in my office, I felt slow, useless, and inefficient-feelings that irritate me more than anything.
I wanted to come in, learn quickly, and rock this new job. This is where I was always supposed to be. This is my passion and everything I worked towards. So, why do I suck? Why was I getting rocked by these emails I couldn’t answer and these projects I couldn’t finish? In moments of self-doubt, I tend to look inward to what I could have done better, but the reality is that sometimes there’s just too much on a single person’s plate. I didn’t want to practice self-compassion, because I didn’t want to fail or seem weak, but at the same time, I was questioning whether or not I was cut out for this field at all.
With thoughts swirling and the pit in my stomach sinking deeper and deeper, that’s when I got an unexpected call from my colleague and Assistant Director, Amy. She wasn’t my direct supervisor, so she absolutely did not have to check in with me, but she took the time to call anyways. And at that moment, she affirmed me and told me that I was doing a good job and that she and others could tell that I was giving this my all, even if I was too self-deprecating to see it. Beyond her praise, she also shared a cautionary tale about selectively saying yes and being comfortable with giving pushback to things that could overwhelm me. And one thing that sticks with me is that she ended by saying, ‘I am telling you this because I don’t want to see you burnout and quit. It’s happened to others before, but I don’t want that to be your experience.’
It was a short call on an ordinary afternoon, but that moment started to give me the confidence to go beyond just asking questions as “the new guy”. It affirmed that I was doing a good job and that I could give feedback if things were overwhelming. It allowed me to take ownership over my work-life balance, my time, and my well-being. And it all stems from that moment.
“This is my passion and everything I worked towards.” Man, I was impressed and almost moved by this young man. What a hard worker and dedicated, aspiring professional! He really reminded me of my younger self… 
I went on to ask many more questions about his career path: Was this his first job in this field (higher ed)? What was his previous job experience like? Why did he come here? What was he even thinking?! I meant… what was his motivation for this job and what his career goal was? What made you interested in applying to this job at Cal Lu? How did he envision his work life with this position?
Edward: This current job is my second job in higher education. Previously, I worked as an Assistant Resident Director at UCLA, which was a natural next step from my time as a Resident Assistant while I was an undergraduate. However, my motivation and passion for this field (financial aid) started before that. As an out-of-state student, I was completely alone in navigating higher education. When I showed up to UCLA, I had no direction.. All of the clubs rejected my application, except for a volunteer organization called MoneyThink. MoneyThink is an organization that works to promote and teach financial literacy to underprivileged high school students. As I grew more dedicated to the club, I worked in recruitment, curriculum development, and eventually was co-president. In my time there, I learned that financial literacy can truly change a student’s trajectory in life and affects their choice to pursue higher education. We tried to dispel the “transfer stigma” that students have around attending community or junior colleges. Our most important lesson saw us break down the cost of a transfer unit in comparison to a traditional four-year institution’s cost. After that specific lesson, a student had reached out to one of our transfer student mentors and asked how they attended community college and then transferred to UCLA. That’s when I realized that our work was positively impacting our students.
Paired with that experience, I also worked as a Student Programming Peer at UCLA’s Financial Wellness Program in designing presentations and counseling students on topics like budgeting or student loans. I learned from Moneythink that financial literacy can change trajectories, but I learned from the Financial Wellness Program that financial literacy can help keep students in school once they get there. I also learned that there is no such thing as “common knowledge”; everyone is at a different place and it’s foolish and insensitive to assume a student ought to know something. Higher education tends to punish students for not knowing things they never had a chance to learn with their parents or siblings.
Reflecting on those experiences, I realized that financial aid is a field where I can counsel, advise, and educate the students I work with. I wanted to serve students in an impactful way, and bring personability, kindness, and empathy to a field that can be perceived as bureaucratic and heartless from the outside. That’s what motivated me to apply and work in this position. I view my work as a financial aid counselor as a means for affecting positive change in higher education, even if I have to start at the bottom rung of the ladder. I knew that the counselor position had to be my first step to enter the field, and over the past 4 years, I did everything to learn about the field and try to break into it, even when other financial aid professionals said that it’d be difficult or impossible to come in with zero financial aid experience. Yet, here I am. It’s unfortunate that my hiring took place at the start of the pandemic, but I was not going to let it discourage me from learning. I had worked too hard to let something like remote work hold me back.
As for how I balance work and life, it really comes down to how well I can divide my time. As a remote employee for the better half of last year, I made it my mission to be here promptly at 8 AM and to leave promptly at 5 PM. When your office is your home, that can be very mentally draining without boundaries. With work that is ever-changing and ever-present, there’s no use to me working myself into the ground and answering emails at 7 PM or 5 AM. I value efficiency, consistency, and correctness over speed, exhaustion, and overloading myself. I always hold myself accountable to this, even if overtime is on the table. Each extra hour I work has diminishing returns, so I am locked in while I am working in order to be guilt-free when I am not. It’s worked so far, but we’ll see what happens later.
This dude was totally on fire when it comes to his passion and commitment! (We will definitely check back with him on this a year later )
Seriously, though, there were so many amazing ideas that I would love to hear more about as a faculty member, but now being his IPA buddy, I asked what he would really like us to know about him as a person and a colleague. As a proud API (Asian and Pacific Islander) Employee Affinity Group member on campus, Edward is a first-generation Chinese-American, born to immigrant parents who grew up overseas. Growing up, he spent time in both the American South and the Midwest, where he developed a passion for watching American television and reading books.
Edward: I’m pretty sure this is what helped me learn more about the world as well as the English language. In high school, I developed a desire to “see the rest of the world”, and I thought I’d start with the coasts of our country first. That’s how I ended up at UCLA and where I studied Economics & International Development Studies. There, I also became passionate about working in higher education through my work in student affairs and my involvement with financial literacy organizations.
As a Chinese-American, his connection to his heritage culture comes directly from my family, and he obtained cultural values through the stories his parents shared and their own lived experiences.
Edward: My parents came from very different socioeconomic backgrounds, with my father being the son of farmers in the rural Shandong Province and my mother being the daughter of professors from Shaanxi Province. They are both heroes to me, but my dad is the person that inspires me the most. He grew up with illiterate parents and worked on a farm for most of his childhood, but through his relentless effort and dedication to learning, he was able to eventually complete his Doctorate of Mechanical Engineering in America. My dad loved reading Chinese texts such as “The Water Margin” and “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” to me as a kid, and from there he taught life lessons rooted in the cultural context of my people. To me, being Chinese-American means being a well-rounded person, or “Wen Wu” (文武). In antiquity, this refers to “Civil” and “Military/Martial”. However, in the modern context, I internalize this as trying to live as a complete individual, someone who can balance qualities such as intelligence and humility or resilience and empathy, to name a few examples. I strongly believe that living a good life requires balance, and I am both grateful and proud that I can connect to my heritage through the Chinese language, history, and philosophy.
I finally asked how he would want us to talk about him. (We know how small CLU is ) I asked it this way– if I am leaving CLU tomorrow, how should I remember him as a CLU colleague who I once enjoyed working with, who has certainly made my work life at CLU much enjoyable?
Edward: “As a person, I would say that two mantras are core to who I am and what I want to be remembered for. The first one comes from Dale Carnegie; he believed that everyone has an innate desire to feel important, but there are few people that look to make others feel important. However, from his perspective, the people that value and treat others with respect are the most influential. So, to this first point, I want to be remembered first as someone who valued his colleagues and tried to celebrate the individuality of others in a way that respects their individual narrative. Secondly, I grew up in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and Fred Rogers always challenged his audience members to “make goodness attractive”; he proposes that we can do this by bringing courage into the lives of those close to us. On this note, I want to be known and remembered as someone that genuinely tried to be authentic, empathetic, and without a hidden agenda. In short, I want to be remembered as someone with a big heart but a good head on his shoulders.”
This is so uncanny. That’s exactly how I want to be remembered by my colleagues as well… In all seriousness, my impressions of Edward have been a warm, fun-loving, caring, and genuine person with a great sense of humor that would not even be contained on a small screen on Zoom during our monthly IPA me
etings. We are so lucky to have him at CLU. I hope he has settled in nicely here and will stay on at his job. At least he deserves an extended honeymoon period with this new place and new colleagues… I know for sure he is a guy that y’all would love to hang out or have lunch with in person. I hope he will feel more loved when the campus reopens. You can find his contact… by searching for “your counselor” at Financial Aid.