<p>Asians do make a big deal about race in admissions, and they certainly have a point - to an extent. Yale would not suddenly become 30% Asian without an affirmative action policy. People who think so do not understand how the admissions system works, and people who talk about UC-Berkeley being flooded by Asians don’t understand the fundamental difference between a school like UC-Berkeley and a school like Yale. You get in with AI pretty much at Berkeley. Asians have higher numbers, and may be very qualified on paper, but that’s not really what it’s about. You need to jump off the page, and with your essay, you need to be confident and have an original voice. There is still a ton of luck in the process, and there are certainly Asians/whites who do not get accepted who would if they were black/hispanic/NA. It’s definitely hard. But the “quota” that is often spoken of is drastically exaggerated, and I still think that only a small minority of college applicants have any clue about the process (and it’s not always those who get in that do).</p>
<p>and since when do “math/science” type people qualify as the boring no-lives? honestly, i’d rather be around a person who can explain theories in quantum physics to me than a person who can quote lines from shakespeare. i also think that people are intimidated by asians. yes, intimidated, because it is alot harder to be so math/science involved. and because people are jealous of these types of people, they group them in the socially incompetent/inadequate category. it’s pure stereotyping, that’s what it is. you see an asian name on an application, and you automatically allow your mind to notice certain parts of the application that verify your stereotypes</p>
<p>with that being said, there is nothing wrong with being a math/science person, and asians should embrace that more than try to shy away from it for the sake of “convincing” a random admissions counselor to take you into a certain school. there is also a bias in the application readers according to their college major/experiences. if a reader majored in political science, he/she probably had minimal interaction with her/his peers in the maths/sciences/engineering major and just saw them and their academics as banal and boring.</p>
<p>Actually the nuances involved in the interpretation of literature are VASTLY more intellectually stimulating than quantum physics. </p>
<p>Physics lacks analytic ability except in the evaluation of concrete externalizes around specific events. But when it comes to deep abstract thinking, even in quantum mechanics stuff, literature wins every time.</p>
<p>I actually agree with both pigs<em>at</em>sea and Dbate. There’s nothing wrong with being passionate about any subject. In fact, the best thing would be to love them all. Biases exist, we can’t do anything about them. What we can do is live our lives with confidence and pride about what we love - my friends who love math and science are awesome people, and having a conversation with someone who adores literature can really get you thinking.
I do think people are intimidated by those who show more awareness of the world than they do. People assume that cookie cutter math/science Asians are boring. Too bad; they don’t know what they’re missing. We should be proud to be Asians, African-Americans, Hispanics, Caucasians, Native Americans, Wookies, or whatever we are. But sometimes I think we’re over-analyzing this process too much. When we’re sitting in college a year from now I’m sure we’ll see things much more differently (as I know Dbate does).</p>
<p>:P I’d say the level of intellectual stimulation depends on whether you’re more of a left or right-brained person, as different people would find different subjects interesting, and thus stimulating (it doesn’t matter how stimulating the literature piece is if you’re not interested- stimulation is, I think, a bilateral process)</p>
<p>I have virtually no left brain at all (not even kidding- I bet that if my head was cut open, there would be an empty space where the left part should be). I’m terrible at both math and science, and have always found it hard to pay attention in those classes…</p>
<p>And I’m Asian. An international student residing in an Asian country to boot. I can say that the math-science stereotype is really nothing but, well, a stereotype. I go to school with only Asians and not all of them are fantastic in those fields (though we’d all like to be :)). In fact, there are only a handful of math-science people, and the rest are strong in other fields such as history and even literature.</p>
<p>Of course, there ARE many Asians who are math-oriented. Just as there are many, many Caucasians, African-Americans, Hispanics, etc. who are just as talented in math and science. But there are just as many, if not more (where I live, at least) Asians who identify themselves as right-brained. A wild guess would have me say that the math curriculum in grade schools is slightly more rigid than their foreign counterparts, which may (and may not) contribute to the issue.</p>
<p>Personally, I feel that anything discriminatory is wrong, and as a half-Asian myself, the “Asians are grinds” argument makes me roll my eyes a little because 1) it’s a rather racist statement in itself and 2) it assumes that what Asians “lack” all other racial groups have (someone has already referenced the Duke mismatch article on page 2 of this thread; you can look towards that for some rather eye-opening data).</p>
<p>But frankly, these sort of threads go nowhere. Instead of focusing only on the Asian aspect of it, let’s look a bit further at affirmative action to see where the bigger problems are rooted. Here is a post I made that I feel would be a nice transition into a more reason-based discussion and not one filled with suppositions about the personality of Asian people (because even if it were all true or all false, who really knows?). Plus, this is where we should be discussing race, not here.</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1063734674-post363.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1063734674-post363.html</a></p>
<p>stereotyping has its root in truth- the truth very much exaggerated though of course.</p>
<p>as for the literature/ physics debate, the great thing about yale is that you can be surrounded by people who are intensely interested in literature, people intensely interested in math, people intensely interested in both- people who are also open to hearing and learning from others. as for myself, i’m not terrible at math/ sci but i definitely lean towards humanities- i can explain at length about certain papers and creative projects ive done in school that have completely changed the way i think and approach the world, and im sure that many people can say the same for math/ sci- just not me. its all relative…</p>
<p>regarding the mismatch article:
do adcoms really use a point-scale to add up “points” in each of the categories: test scores, essay, personal qualities, etc
because using a numerical scale results inevitably among disparity in grading from person to person. if you know what I mean</p>
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<p>Your argument is that you’re not ignorant because you believe a lot of people, rather than everyone, incorrectly blame race as a factor in college admissions?</p>
<p>I find that just a bit amusing.</p>
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Anecdotal evidence.</p>
<p>Since posters insist on pointing to Berkeley, let’s run the data on UC Statfinders.</p>
<p>Incoming Asian students: 1693
Engineering: 373 (22%)
Biology: 291 (17%)
Physical Sciences: 90 (5%)
Math: 30 (2%)
Total basic sciences: 46%</p>
<p>Foreign languages + English + Philosophy + Humanities + Social Sciences + History + Area Studies+ Visual Arts: 192 (11.4%)</p>
<p>Most of the other fields strongly favor left-brained students – business, natural resources, etc.</p>
<p>^ Exactly how do you find that data on UC Statfinder? I browsed the site but couldn’t find where to look up major breakdown by ethnicity.</p>
<p>For class of 2004 (most recent class I could find with a negligible number of “undeclared”):</p>
<p>Freshmen white students: 1161
Foreign languages + English + Philosophy + Humanities + Social Sciences + History + Area Studies+ Visual Arts: 213 (18.3%)</p>
<p>So more white students are entering right-brained fields. It’s not a shocker; if anything, the numbers are a lot less extreme than I feared (they definitely aren’t close to extreme enough to suggest that intended major is the trump card against all Asian discrimination arguments, for starters). Plus, there are many ways to explain these numbers, one being that Asian students, especially immigrants, are more inclined to pick a major that speaks the international language of math (whereas white applicants probably have no such reserve).</p>
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<p>My point was that you can’t immediately assume that the majority of Asians are doing math/science. And I stand by that- you can’t. Maybe I’m speaking from an international point of view, but the stats are for incoming students. For a school that is relatively popular among int’l students interested in science, for a number of reasons.</p>
<p>When it comes to applications, the literature/history/language/etc. students in my country brace themselves for a more brutal showdown than the math/science kids. Because every year, more of those students get into colleges, because for an international Asian student, it is easier to take such subjects than to adjust to a second language and such.</p>
<p>Back to a more comprehensive view…if the affirmative action policy did not exist, more Asians might have been admitted, if you consider scores and such. Then again, they might have not. I certainly do not want to be struck down because of affirmative action, but I am doubtful that policy can be the sole target for blame in such an event…</p>
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<p>hmmm…nuances in literature? like interpreting the meaning of the color GREEN…G.R.E.E.N?? >_<
well let’s see, green. hmmm. that’s a tough one. green can represent life, vivacity, sprightliness, spring. wow, that was so deep and stimulating</p>
<p><em>goes back to her stimulating newton series stuff after being distracted by green</em></p>
<p>"^how do YOU know our race is not to blame? can you honestly say that I (I can show you my stats, etc) would have been deferred if I was a URM? "</p>
<p>I never singled out any specific Asians or people in this thread. People jump to conclusions and it’s ridiculous.</p>
<p>pigs, your last few posts are really stunning in their ignorance.</p>
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<p>I, for one, majored in Literature (literary theory). My closest college friends and roommates included a BS/MS in molecular biology (later MD/PhD and chair of oncology at a world-class hospital), a future Harvard med professor and medical outcomes researcher, an engineering major who went on to get an OR PhD, a geology/geophysics major, and a computer science major. Some humanities and social sciences types, too, of course. These weren’t acquaintances; they were people I spent a ton of time with. Senior year, I did a whole reading project on sociobiology with one of them because he wanted someone to discuss things with.</p>
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<p>You clearly have no idea what literary analysis is. I understand that may be the fault of your teachers or your school rather than some problem of yours, but you probably shouldn’t brag about your lack of education.</p>
<p>ok maybe my english department at school sucked</p>
<p>what’s the difference? i still learned calculus</p>
<p>i’m asian and i got in this year through SCEA</p>
<p>play nice, people ^^ are we REALLY having a math v. english debate here though? reaaallyyyy? come on, guys, I thought CCers were smart enough to realize both subjects for their respective merits and flaws. There are things you can gain from an indepth review of math (generally speaking) that you can’t from english (also generally speaking). So can’t we just concede that different people have different tastes… to each their own sort of thing? ^^</p>
<p>It isn’t. We’re like 16% of Yale but only 2% of the country’s population. We might be the most over-represented minority at Yale, with the exception of Jews (1% of the American population, at least a quarter of Yale)</p>