From completing an honors thesis to juggling collegiate athletics and studying abroad, part of the Trinity experience involves the mastery of multitasking. For Ben Kim, senior economics major and math minor, all of this work has taught him how to socialize better.
Trinity’s cross-country team recruited Kim while he was in high school. He said that the team felt smaller when he first got to Trinity, but as the team recruited more students, the team culture strengthened.
“The mindset feels really competitive right now, and I think it will get more going forwards,” Kim said. “Everyone is super dialed. It’s a really supportive and a cool feeling.”
Kim has run cross-country competitively for seven years now, specializing in long distance events. He will run a 10K this weekend, April 26-27, at the SCAC tournaments. According to Kim, cross-country gives him a way to consistently engage with his friends, and he doesn’t know what his college experience would have been like without that support.
“I would say I’m good at making friends, but I’m bad at putting myself in a position to make friends, where I’m seeing people every day and being exposed to social interactions. The team element of always going to practice is really cool,” Kim said. “It just feels like you have a family.”
Kim also has a younger sister who goes to Trinity, and they both agree that you can mesh with just about anybody on campus — no matter how different they are from you. He said that interacting with different kinds of people has helped him get a good understanding of others. According to him, the size of the campus helps with that kind of engagement.
“Everyone here is kind of weird. They’ve all got some quirk where it’s like, ‘Oh, you’re really into this,’” Kim said. “I feel like it’s maybe the biggest weakness, if you choose to see it that way. But also, it’s cool because you can meet someone that has really niche, specific knowledge or a weird sense of humor that’s cool and you can mesh with.”
In addition to running cross-country, Kim is currently finishing up a thesis with departmental honors in the economics department. His thesis revolves around healthcare and physician prescribing, specifically on a set of laws that allow nurses to prescribe drugs independently.
“I looked at if people change their Google searches in response to that legislation change, which they don’t,” Kim said. “It’s kind of annoying that there’s no result, but also, it’s informative because people don’t really know what’s going on with the healthcare system. At least, as long as it doesn’t apply directly to them.”
Working on his thesis helped set him up for a post-graduate career. He plans to move to Dallas to work as a research analyst alongside several PhD economists. Kim said that he will be mainly responsible for setting up the figures and summary statistics. He’s been to Dallas before, and he’s excited to move there with a couple of friends.
After all of his time at Trinity, Kim has learned quite a bit about himself. He said that if he was able to speak to himself when he was a first-year, he would advise himself to not stress out so much about schoolwork, especially if outside pressure causes the stress.
“Everyone around me was stressed, and sometimes the classes were legitimately hard and it was stressful, but sometimes you get into this group-think,” Kim said. “I feel like it would have been easier if I just objectively looked at it like, ‘Okay, you know how to do this. Maybe you have to study this, but don’t stress just for the sake of feeling stressed.’”
