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that end in mind. Their response to TFA: “Hmm.”
    Missy, my college roommate, was the most supportive of the idea. “You should absolutely do it,” she said. A couple of my do-gooder friends were applying to TFA, too. So I signed up for an interview and prepared to compete for a job.
    I had to design a lesson that I would teach to the other interviewees and TFA staff, who would listen and grade my skills. I chose to teach a lesson in how to say “Hello” in Japanese, which isn’t that simple, since there are two forms of speech: formal and informal. I launched into the lesson by using two of the students interviewing with me as subjects. Even then I had a knack for hooking in the class. I held their attention, made them repeat the phrase in various ways, and came away feeling pretty good.
    The second part of the application process didn’t go so well. I had a one-on-one interview with a TFA staffer named Regina Sullivan. I left the interview thinking she didn’t like me. We just didn’t hit it off.
    â€œI’m not going to get that job,” I told my roommate.
    I started reviewing my graduate school options when . . . to my surprise, the acceptance letter arrived from TFA.
    Inza was surprised, too.
    â€œAre you crazy?” she asked. “We didn’t send you to an Ivy League college so you could become a teacher! This is absolutely unacceptable. There is no way that we will allow you to do this!”
    I couldn’t believe it. I looked toward my dad plaintively. He had always been my champion, and he was much more civic-minded than my mother. My mother and I both held our breath as we waited for him to weigh in. He thought for a few minutes with a pensive look on his face. Finally, he spoke.
    â€œThis would be a good thing for you to do. Give it a try,” Shang said.
    â€œYuh-Bo!” my mother shrieked, hurling “honey” in Korean as an epithet. They left the room, and I could hear them going at it. Shang returned.
    â€œShe’s going,” my father declared. And that was that. My father had spoken, and his word was the last.
    The problem was, I was ambivalent, too. I am not much of a planner. I never knew what I wanted to do from one stage in life to another. I always admired people who, from when they were very little, knew they wanted to be a doctor or a writer or a teacher. That has never been me. When I was in high school I didn’t know where I wanted to go to college. When I was in college I didn’t know what I wanted to do after graduation. But I knew that I liked working with children, I believed that public education was important, and I figured this would buy me some time. I accepted the job.
    A FTER A QUICK BREAK at home in Toledo for two weeks, I boarded a plane from Detroit to Los Angeles, where I would spend the rest of the summer training to be a teacher—kind of.
    I remember getting off the plane and seeing people with TFA signs. We were funneled onto buses. I got into one of the front seats and stared straight ahead. Behind me the bus was packed with white kids flirting and yammering. I rolled my eyes and thought, “Good Lord, this is like summer camp.”
    We arrived at California State University’s campus at Northridge, where TFA held its summer institute. At the dorm I lugged my bag into a two-bedroom “pod” with a common room. No one was there, but one bed had bags and stuff on it. It looked to me, based on the pictures on her desk, like it belonged to a preppy white kid, so I moved my things into the other bedroom. My eventual roommate, Deepa Purohit, turned out to have come from Cleveland, and we even had a few friends in common. The white girl was Liz Peterson, a true California girl from Long Beach. She roomed with Rosemary Ricci, who was from outside of Philadelphia. Within a few days together, I had thrown my juvenile biases aside, the four of us grew very close, and Liz Peterson