121–130 of 136 posts
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Valid point, but there's something to be said for the Asian American community's obsession with education. Is it any surprise that they are the most successful minority group in America?
Not even close to the success of Indian Americans
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People are fighting for As, and maybe working their butts off, but they could be doing a lot less, getting their straight Cs, and not get kicked out. It is easy to be mediocre and stay in Harvard if you already got in. (What gets people kicked out is a major depressive episode that results in DNFing all their classes for a while, not handing in mediocre homework consistently.)
True, but nobody is trying to get a C. Mediocrity is possible everywhere. Zuckerberg could have just made a university-specific social network and have gotten by. Bill Gates could have just made software for altair and gotten by. Larry Page could have just let Google work for libraries and would have made good money. Elon Musk could have stopped after selling PayPal. When talking about people just trying to get by, y…
There is so much more to this video than Jack Ma's rejection from Harvard. His company, Alibaba, is second only to Walmart in e-commerce business. He talks about Alibaba's success internationally (places like Russia and Norway). He also talks about the company's relationship with government regarding technology projects and privacy.
Thank you. That's really a small part of the video. I get the sense that most of these comments are coming from people who didn't watch it.
The interview contains a lot of other more inspiring stories than just his Harvard rejections.
For example, he talks about how he comes from a pretty bad elementary school, how he learned about the internet, how Alibaba got its name, how none of his capital came from the government, that Alibaba's workforce is actually ~47% women, how he rather would be respected than be rich, and his philosophy on businesses helping people.
Near the end, he says: "I believe when you have 1 million dollars, that’s your money. When you have 20 million dollars, you start to have problems, worry about inflation, worry about which stock to buy, this and that - When you have 1 billion dollars, that’s not your money. That’s the trust society gives you. They believe you can manage the money - use the money better than the government, than the others. So I think today, I have the resources to do more things. With the money we have, with the influence we have, we should spend more time on the young people."
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> Of course not, even though you'd be hard-pressed to suggest that they were great fits for their programs since they dropped out after their first year. Bill Gates was just a semester shy of graduating and even published a paper in his junior year at Harvard. There are many many Stanford graduate students who take leave of absences to work on entrepreneurship -- Larry and Sergey just were wildly successful with thei…
And Zuckerberg? Jobs? Ellison? Dell? If you think that elite schools wouldn't want one of the world's wealthiest and most powerful entrepreneurs on their list of alumni instead of another lawyer or investment banker even if they knew they were not a "great fit," you put more stock in the principles of admissions committees than I. The reality is pretty simple. The Harvard's and Stanford's of the world put out an enor…
Jobs credited Reed classes for inspiring the beauty and font quality that made Mac a standout.
They were great fits for their school, they just didn't need he arbtirary 4-year degree.
I don't know about the others.
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Asian-Americans (including Chinese-Americans) have to have better grades and test scores to have the same chance as your average white American to get into an elite university, so I can see why Asian-American parents would think it's necessary for their children to focus so much on improving their test scores.
I think the natural followup question is- why do Asian American parents think their children need to get into elite universities?
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Valid point, but there's something to be said for the Asian American community's obsession with education. Is it any surprise that they are the most successful minority group in America?
Self-selection bias. The Asian American community is immensely diverse and consists of many different immigrant (and native!) waves. Wealthy, well-educated Taiwanese semiconductor engineers from the '70s and '80s are not the same as LA Korean grocers are not the same as Vietnamese boat people are not the same as Hmong refugees are not the same as recent mainland Chinese nouveau riche are not the same as Nisei and San…
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It's not just Chinese-Americans. I live in Fairfax, VA and the entire county is bonkers over GPAs. It's to the point that >20% of my son's high school class had "better than perfect" GPAs (possible because honors/AP come with bonus points). Many of those same kids spent their afternoons being shuttled from enrichment program to enrichment program. Very little unscheduled time where they could just be kids. I question…
> I question the sanity of it all. I didn't have anywhere the level of structured activity as a teen and still managed to gain entry to a top-20 university. Presumably because I was successful in things I enjoyed, not things my parents thought were good application boosters. It's much more difficult today. The US has unquestionably the best university system in the world, which means American students are competing w…
I wonder how much impact international students have on the prospects of US students applying to US universities? I'm sure at the super-elite schools, there is an effect. But, at the big state schools? I don't know.
I'd also love to see a plot of college "seats" vs overall population. I know all the Virginia state schools have increased enrollment, but probably not enough to keep up with population growth. Is this true across the nation? Probably.
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Thank you. That's really a small part of the video. I get the sense that most of these comments are coming from people who didn't watch it.
Agreed. Having watched the video after reading the comments, I am actually rather disappointed at some of the negative things written here. The interview contains a lot of other more inspiring stories than just his Harvard rejections. For example, he talks about how he comes from a pretty bad elementary school, how he learned about the internet, how Alibaba got its name, how none of his capital came from the governme…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Valid point, but there's something to be said for the Asian American community's obsession with education. Is it any surprise that they are the most successful minority group in America?
Self-selection bias. The Asian American community is immensely diverse and consists of many different immigrant (and native!) waves. Wealthy, well-educated Taiwanese semiconductor engineers from the '70s and '80s are not the same as LA Korean grocers are not the same as Vietnamese boat people are not the same as Hmong refugees are not the same as recent mainland Chinese nouveau riche are not the same as Nisei and San…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Self-selection bias. The Asian American community is immensely diverse and consists of many different immigrant (and native!) waves. Wealthy, well-educated Taiwanese semiconductor engineers from the '70s and '80s are not the same as LA Korean grocers are not the same as Vietnamese boat people are not the same as Hmong refugees are not the same as recent mainland Chinese nouveau riche are not the same as Nisei and San…
Well, German Americans are not the same as Irish Americans are not the same as Italians who've just gotten their citizenship are not the same as... but they all get lumped under the category "white people", so it is what it is. Any way you slice up "Asian American" they still far exceed their minority peers (and even whites), so I'm not sure what you're getting at here.
Point is, different immigrant groups have different origins. Some have a leg up over other ones in terms of socioeconomic and education backgrounds, leading to different results. Asian-American isn't a monolithic bloc, regardless of what activists might say.