This guy is apparently Mindy Kaling’s brother, the TV actress.
In his blog, Chokal-Ingam, 38, says that his modest 3.1 GPA didn’t seem like it would cut it to get him accepted into a top tier medical school, so he adopted his middle name — Jojo — and gave himself a mini-makeover. “So, I shaved my head, trimmed my long Indian eyelashes, and applied to medical school as a black man,” he writes. “My change in appearance was so startling that my own fraternity brothers didn’t recognize me at first.”
Chokal-Ingam was accepted into some top medical schools, and he even enrolled in St. Louis University, before ultimately dropping out after two years. “Lucky for you, I never became a doctor,” he wrote on his website. He did, however, earn his MBA at UCLA. Perhaps his conscience caught up to him, as he was accepted as an Indian man there.
On his Facebook page, Vijay has been posting about how his scam awoke him to the realities of affirmative action and racism, calling it a “stomach churning eye opener.” But he seems set on letting people know that he did not do anything bad. “For the record, I never lied about anything in my application to medical school except my race,” he writes. Much like his sister, the few that are commenting on his Facebook page are not thrilled.
He was not “accepted into top medical schools.” He was admitted into one relatively obscure school, and rejected elsewhere. This is all self-promotion of the ugliest variety. He is in Business school now.
In order to transform his application completely, he would have needed to get the cooperation of the professors who wrote the letters of recommendation so that they would use the different name, and he would have needed to change his name on his transcript and his MCAT score report.
Which means that either he is making stuff up, or that he has a truly twisted attitude. In either case, if I were the dean of his MBA program, he would be out the door.
Thank you @ucbalumnus -That is an excellent point. Being Asian, I would be an “over-represented minority”, however, even I understand that being Black not only gives you an advantage in admissions, but also comes with a terrible price sometimes in the form of racism. That man cheating the system by declaring himself as African American is an insult to the struggle that many real African Americans have to deal with.
I didn’t know that UCLA was privatizing. And the link in the article goes to the UCLA Civil Rights Project which was established in 1996 (14 years before he attended).
Similar to what Elizabeth Warren did, except she claimed to be Indian, which she was NOT. Now people want her to run for president…even though she lied! Incredible.
@zbd5421. First of all, Elizabeth Warren claimed to be Native American, not Indian. Secondly there is proof that Warren was indeed part native american (1/32 to be exact).
@sgppail2 What really got people’s goat regarding Elizabeth Warren is that many New England families have been here for a long time and can claim Native American ancestory 5 or 6 generations back bur we don’t because it seems unethical to benefit when no one in recent memory has any recollection of hardship. There are people in New England who do still face the negative affects based on their race and those are the folks that people would like to see helped not some blond chick who is 1/32 or 1/64 Native American.
kind of a funny thing - our school district puts out its demographic and showed that we had 20% ‘American Indian or Alaskan’ (or something like that). I am pretty sure the count of actual Native Americans would be 0-5, so I am guessing that a lot of our South Asian Indian families checked that box by mistake. I wonder if they make that mistake on their college apps, too!
^ And 1/32 is the MOST she can be. Sarah Smith ( nice Cherokee name) might have only been half or a quarter Cherokee. Which means that Elizabeth Warren might be only 1/64 or 1/128. But she rocks that minority status. lol
@jbourne I’m about 90 percent sure it’s titled as “Native American” on the Common App. Regardless, it asks you for a tribal identification number if you try to identify as Native American. Also, most South Indian names are fairly obviously South Indian.
And the link in the article goes to the UCLA Civil Rights Project which was established in 1996 (14 years before he attended).