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Business Insider reports:
With a perfect ACT score and 13 Advanced Placement courses under his belt, Michael Wang applied to seven Ivy League universities and Stanford in 2013.
As an Asian-American, Wang suspected his race might work against him. But but he was still shocked when he was rejected by Stanford and every Ivy League school except for the University of Pennsylvania.
Wang says he worked incredibly hard and excelled in every area possible. But it still wasn't good enough.
"There was nothing humanly possible I could do," Wang told us, explaining that he felt utterly demoralized after his rejections.
After Wang was rejected from most of the Ivies, he says he filed a complaint with the US Department of Education alleging Yale, Stanford, and Princeton discriminated against him because he was Asian-American.
[...] Wang isn't alone in his belief that the Ivies discriminate against Asians. A coalition of Asian-American groups filed a lawsuit against Harvard University last month alleging the school and other Ivy League institutions use racial quotas to admit students to the detriment of more qualified Asian-American applicants. The more than 60 Asian groups are coming together to fight what they say are unfair admission practices.
[...] He also stressed that he was not just academically driven, but also a well-rounded applicant who maximized his extracurricular activities. He competed in national speech and debate competitions and math competitions. He also plays the piano and performed in the choir that sang at President Barack Obama's 2008 inauguration.
Original Submission
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 04 2015, @04:17AM
Looking back in retrospect, your note of social skills being arguably among the most important skills we can acquire are validated. I did spend a lot of time doing my homework when I could have been socializing. I may not have known how to do the signal processing, but I would have been more social.
The trouble with me was I had work to do. I had a project I wanted done right, and that often meant I did it personally. I felt awful foolish going out and screwing around when I knew that every hour spent screwing around was yet another hour my work would be delayed. I guess it was an old hangover from my earlier school-days when my parents would say things like "is your homework finished?" before I could watch TV.
Quite simply, it never occurred to me that company CEO's would place me under management types who ranked party-skills over workmanship.
I saw a kindred spirit in Wang. It was a kind of confirmation and closure to my frustration about knowing the great abundance of workers we have in America - so many we can just toss them, while we go into national debt paying for both the people who reject the workman, and pay for the social services for the jobless.
If only our laws fomented productivity instead of banking/investment tricks like fractional reserve illusions and house flipping.
As it stands, management can always hire an H1-B to come in, do the work, get screwed, and leave. Management does not have to worry about burning them out. Employees are nothing more than a rental car.
The man who grows the apples is not nearly as valuable than the man who can pick up ten apples and throw away nine. Not in a world where apples are in great abundance. And apparently men like Wang are in great abundance... so much so they get thrown away.
I know how worthless I felt when I was terminated. I know its a common meme. Even Matt Groenig ran an episode of "The Simpsons" on that meme with Frank Grimes.
But then, this is what one pays for being allowed to do what one loves to do in the first place. I love to build things. No different than the one who loves to surf, play the guitar, or any number of things. I just could not see spending my life doing anything else than what I am internally driven to do. Problem is there is not much market for it.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Thursday June 04 2015, @07:26AM
Well, if you're a programmer or engineer, there is actually quite a market for your skills. And Wang didn't get "thrown away", he got into a highly selective universities. He just thought he deserved to get into more of them. The problem is really that some good, but fairly arbitrarily chosen, schools have better name recognition among the general public (i.e., parents) than other schools which are really just as good, and better in some areas, mostly for historical reasons. So everyone applies to those 10 or so schools, and those schools basically flip a coin deciding who to let in.
Wang thinks he "needed" to get into Harvard or Stanford, when he'll really probably be fine at UPenn and, if his college grades are good, will have a fairly easy time in the job market.
He really should have had a less selective safety school than UPenn, though. In fact, 2 less selective safety schools would probably have been safe. But that's application strategy.
OP START READING HERE IF YOU DON'T READ ANYTHING ELSE:
If you really don't like interacting with others THAT much, you should probably look for work where you can telecommute, or something like that. But I've been fortunate to have experience working in multiple non-toxic work environments and, as a fellow STEM devotee, I can say that interacting with co-workers can be more than doable, you can actually make friends that way. Maybe you should look for less toxic work environments when you apply for a job. Maybe you should also look at yourself, and see if you actually are the toxicity in your work environments. Please understand I don't mean that as an insult -- all I mean by that is you might be difficult to work with. Working well with others is a skill you can learn. In any case, you should probably get some counseling. Deciding to drink yourself to death is a pretty drastic decision, and one that shouldn't be made lightly, or without getting external input. And we do have universal healthcare in the US now, so you probably qualify for either Medicaid or at least premium subsidies if you're out of work but not old enough for Medicare, so hopefully and probably a few sessions with a therapist would be affordable for you no matter your financial condition.
I sincerely wish you the best of luck in finding happiness.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday June 04 2015, @02:49PM
On the plus side, it's never too late to start developing those social skills. And you don't even have to be *good* at them, just getting to the point where you can kind of fake it while the extroverts you're dealing with do the heavy lifting makes a world of difference. Let them be the engine - just being a bearing instead of a rock in the gears makes everything go far more smoothly. And with a bit of luck and attention, after a while all that rolling around will give you a much more intuitive sense of how the game is played, and let you start driving things a bit yourself.