<p>We make up around 2% of the American population...we're not even part of America's mainstream media. Indians are recent integration of the American society.</p>
<p>Personally speaking, I'm the first Indians in our school in ten years to have applied to MIT and Ivy League schools.
We have Indian gangs who cause trouble in our school and they're really poor. Most of their parents are postmen and taxi drivers (its really true).</p>
<p>So why aren't we URM?</p>
<p>Because in the broader context Indians are overrepresented in universities. In other words, Indians represent more than 2% of applicants to these universities because they tend to be quite qualified.</p>
<p>Because a larger portion of MIT is indian than the portion that is indian in the us. </p>
<p>I assumed you meant asian indian. Forget me if I’m wrong.</p>
<p>“URM” stands for under-represented minority; that’s why.</p>
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What does this mean?</p>
<p>QuantumArbiter, your school may be a bit of an exception that Asian Indians belong to gangs and like. In many schools around the country Asian Indians are very strong applicants to MIT and like and many do get in. I would also guess that the population of Asian Indians at MIT is higher than national population of Asian Indians. Hence they are not a URM and your school may not be representative.</p>
<p>I believe that there about ten Indian students in my grade. All of them are in the top 10% of the class.</p>
<p>MIT accepts internationals and Asian Indians are around 15% of the world population. If we want to be “representative”, why choose representative of the U.S.? Why not increase the scale to the population of the world? Then Asian Indians would probably be under-represented at MIT.</p>
<p>Why not decrease the scale to the population of Massachusetts. Why not the Boston area? Are Irish-Americans under-represented relative to their numbers around Boston?</p>
<p>How about Thais? Are we considered a URM at MIT?</p>
<p>geomom, I think MIT is more than 15% Indian, actually. They’re just not broken out separately in the minority stats (because Indians are ethnically Caucasian).</p>
<p>^Aren’t Indians considered Asian (at least by the US government)?</p>
<p>Being Indian is not considered a URM because the country is the second most populated country in the world. </p>
<p>And because there are a higher proportion of Indians in college than in the general population of this country. That is, even if there are only 2% Indians in this country, there are more than 2% in colleges.</p>
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<p>Umm…it means what it means lol. We have Asian Indian gangsters who pick fights and are very anti-social…very aloof and non-fluent in English. They seek trouble and disregard their GPA, etc.</p>
<p>^ I think Inconclusive is asking “why is this relevant?”.</p>
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I’m speculating this is OP’s reasoning: If you look at this subset of Indians, they are very likely not an ORM, rather they are probably URM. Is it fair that that just because they share the same genes as those in the top 10% that they should be discriminated against?</p>
<p>quantum u must be veryproud of ur fluency in english eh?
non fluency doesnt mean no brains u know</p>
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<p>I think Indians being ethnically Caucasian pretty much stretches the definition of “ethnic.”</p>
<p>From Webster:
ETHNIC designating or of any of the basic groups or divisions of mankind or of a heterogeneous population, as distingished by customs, characteristics, language, common history, etc.</p>
<p>It should be obvious that it makes no sense to call people with cultural origins stretching from Iceland to Southeast Asia an ethnic group. Just as biologically it makes no sense to divide people into races. </p>
<p>So the answer to why Indians are not considered URM is that admissions-type people have decided that enough people who look like you are doing well enough, where “look like you” is arbitrarily defined, and “well enough” means a high percentage of your group at MIT compared to the percentages of the population in the U.S.</p>
<p>The fact that your group as you define it is doing terribly locally, is of no concern to admissions except for the way it has affected you personally. If it really has made achieving academic success a struggle for you, maybe you should make the case in your application that you have excelled in difficult circumstances.</p>
<p>^I rarely agree with geomom but I agree on:</p>
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<p>And I don’t know why this hasn’t been brought up… I think that taxi drivers and postmen hold respectable occupations. For example, I’m entrusting a postman that the missing materials of my application reach the admissions office this very moment, and it could very well change my life. What if he misplaces the envelope over breakfast? I had a nice chat about harmonized codes for commodities with the pickup guy - I didn’t know what those were.</p>
<p>There’s a taxi driver with a Stanford PhD and a CV full of research where I live. Retrenched. [A</a> Singapore Taxi Driver’s Diary](<a href=“http://taxidiary.blogspot.com/]A”>http://taxidiary.blogspot.com/) Closely related, there’s a man who could have gotten a share of the Nobel Prize in chemistry who now drives a courtesy van. <a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/17/science/16prasher.html?_r=1[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/17/science/16prasher.html?_r=1</a> I took a cab to my interview (and I had a very engaging conversation with him about building underwater tunnels, and managing the wear of the clutch on a manual vehicle: there was a traffic jam). The last time I took a cab before that was from a university to rush from research to the national olympiad - and he asked me what I was doing there - research, I explained - and he understood what I was talking about. I later learned that both of his sons had presidential scholarships.</p>
<p>If anything, I think Japanese and East Europeans deserve to be URMs.</p>
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I am not making any comment here about politics, or about admissions procedures. Just that people who live in India are derived from earlier ancestors who lived among the Caucasus Mountains, and are, therefore, considered Caucasian, just as white Europeans are. MIT’s admissions office did not make up this definition, nor did any other admissions office at any other university.</p>
<p>But doesn’t mitochondrial DNA show that we all came from Africa, with hefty doses of intermixing of most groups since then? Several thousand years ago some part of that original African group passed through the Caucasus. Is this really important? Now we are all here in the U.S. – Molly, as a biologist, do you really support this racial parsing?</p>
<p>If someone other than admissions made up a silly definition, but admissions uses it, does that make it less silly?</p>