I am not sure I understand the relevance of politics to this discussion. Could you please elaborate?
The most important demographic factor for US college admissions are typically whether one is a domestic or international student. Before that was added to the template, many “chance me” threads did not initially have this information, which meant that the initial responses that assumed domestic were way off once the original poster mentioned being an international student.
1 Like
I am mentioning the broadening out of interests into actual active politics. The fact that it is democrat politics is incidental. This is Just to add to @nyc10023 ’s list of activities that the Asian high school community is engaging in.
1 Like
Meaning it’s another EC. Got it.
Another non-STEM EC, to be specific. I believe that is adding to the examples @nyc10023 and @neela1 are telling us they are seeing in their communities.
Time to lobby @CC_Mike (or whoever maintains the template now). My lobbying to greatly de-emphasize race and ethnicity in the template was only slightly successful, but perhaps more lobbying may have have more success now.
2 Likes
To be clear this crowd is not showing a non stem EC and then going into stem. They are actually going into politics or policy or law post undergrad.
1 Like
Setting aside whether this is sound advice, how is this advice “Asian” specific? Or is it? Is the idea that a “white” kid interested a CS degree can be more honest with their interests because CS is less competitive for them? Or is it something else?
1 Like
Yes. A brown orm boy from an nj private applying to a T5 private in CS is the most toxic category. You need to mitigate some of those adjectives.
I’m sure there are implicit biases at work in college admissions, but hopefully those are at the margin. And of course, Asian Americans are not the only victims of that particular social ill. Not trying to make light of it, but I’ve been on the wrong side of offensive stereotypical comments by people from all walks of life for as long as I can remember.
Beyond the charge of racism, I think you already said it perfectly: just tell them they’re unhooked and that they’re in the pool with everyone else who is unhooked. Period. Why they’re unhooked seems pretty straight forward.
When I was applying to law school, I learned that Cuban Americans didn’t get diversity credit when applying. You could easily draw the inference with the UC applications, which asked only if you were Chicano (Mex. American) or Puerto Rican, and if you weren’t one of those you had no other “Latino” box to check … you were with Whites. In other applications, you had those two choices and “Other Hispanic”. In those cases, I did some digging and had the Deans of admission from Michigan, Columbia and Penn themselves tell me directly that Cubans didn’t count for diversity purposes because they were overrepresented as a % of the population they represented.
I realize since that time we’ve had SCOTUS action rendering quotas unconstitutional, and state action like in WA (since repealed) and CA (don’t know status) forbidding race/ethnicity to be factored into admissions at publics. But however it’s effected, the general mission stands for the vast majority of schools: trying to increase enrollment of underrepresented groups. If you’re overrepresented as a %, or perfectly represented, tough luck.
Individuals can do what they want, but I don’t remember this ever being very controversial amongst the Cuban American community, which is not exactly a sleepy bunch when it comes to political matters. And among the more affluent, they like prestige as much as the next guy.
1 Like
This is where the problem lies when kids try to not be boring. What if they want to major in CS? How does it help them to have other activities? It’s nice that Asian American kids who have significant political activities do well when they apply to political science. What about the Asian American kids who have CS/STEM ECs who want to study CS?
A few things I’ve noticed - it’s all anecdata of course. Apply to “top” SLACs/other private colleges with CS major/concentrations where maybe you don’t declare your major as a freshman. Or where it’s clearly indicated on the college’s website that changing majors is easy (USC for example).
Skillfully weave interest in computing with love of acting in musical theatre (I don’t know anyone IRL who has done this but why not?) Maybe use their CS knowledge for some real-life application.
I should also add that another line of thinking I’ve noticed in the Asian American community (not FGLI) is that the major is starting not to matter as much as the college brand. It’s a little sad, but that’s just an observation.
Is this hypothetical applicant who apparently has no other distinguishing characteristics measurably more disadvantaged than yet another very bright white girl from Western Mass applying to Brown because she wants to make the world a better place?
I believe that implicit bias exists, and I believe that Asian applicants who represent a profile that is well represented on a campus are going to be paddling upstream. I also believe that to be true of other individuals whose profiles blend into a sea of sameness and who may themselves be subject to implicit bias. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard people (mostly women) use the term “mediocre white men” I’d have a whole heck of a lot of nickels.
I would tell an unhooked girl of any ethnic background to work in a STEM angle. That has worked very well in my child’s cohort. Yes, change the world but I’m going to enroll in some STEM classes (not bio/chem but phys/math/CS) because some colleges (not sure about Brown) are looking to alter those ratios.
Right. Be what is in demand rather than what is in oversupply.
Good training for the job market … and for life.
3 Likes
If you substitute “UWA” for “brown ORM”, do you feel the statement still holds true? Or do you feel that ORMs are disadvantaged more than UWAs based on your observations and experience?
1 Like
If you get to a T5 private and do a seriously quant major, and have a high GPA, then major doesn’t matter for many many jobs – any business roles, finance, tech, consulting, law, quant. You can probably wing it to medicine if you have some minimal prereqs like organic chem etc. Apparently major matters to go into policy roles in think tanks etc.
Then you need to walk on water if you are not female
I really don’t think an unhooked female applicant has much of an edge at the T10s (based on observation over the past 2 cycles). They all have a gender ratio close to 50-50 (+/- 2-3%) the last time I checked.
I think there are some differences in standards, I am sad to say.
The bulk of the strong UWMs tend to be as strong as the ORMs
There will be some ORMs (10-30% depending on the year) that will slip through the cracks. This slippage usually won’t happen with the UWMs of equal academic and extra curricular strength.
And there will be some UWMs (a small number) where you will be scratching your head as to how this kid got in – because you’ve (not me the parent) known him for 4 years or more. This is a small setting private school – so it is not as if this kid has something special going on that is unknown to everybody.
In short – there are often positive UWM surprises and negative ORM surprises.
Many female candidates in the top 10% I’ve seen are very strong. But there are also often a small number of positive surprises, especially into STEM. The school community will have a more nuanced sense of someone’s STEM strength than what you think the university would have had conditional on this person getting accepted.
Interestingly, in STEM, at college, we find that the 10% of the crowd that leans towards hard grad classes etc (within, say, a CS major) leans overwhelmingly male.
The gap is likely narrowing at T10, but I don’t see it for places like hardcore STEM places like MIT or CMU (probably for the reason that you are locked in to your major).
And to achieve that 50-50 gender ratio of admitted students, the acceptance rate for women into CS/Math/physics is higher than for men. Sometimes the number is buried because there are likely more female applicants than men to some other STEM fields (chemistry, biology).
I am saying this as a female technologist. This was true in my day (for EE) not sure about today - the median grades of the women in my class were higher than for the men. We had ZERO flunk out (not true for the men). It was likely that the standards were a little relaxed for women getting in but it worked itself out. We were graded anonymously, FWIW. Numbers, not names.
1 Like