When you picture the stereotypical American, you probably envision some middle aged chubby white guy holding a large fries and a diet coke with an American flag waving majestically behind him. No? Okay maybe that’s just me… But around the world Americans are generalized as being white, or Caucasian, or of European descent – whatever you wanna call it. But now more than ever, this is just so untrue.

The Migration Policy Institute has a webpage entirely devoted to “Frequently Requested Statistics on Immigrants and Immigration in the United States” (the stats were all taken in 2013, so they aren’t completely up to date, but they’re still pretty close). From this page, I came to learn that “approximately 80 million persons, or one-quarter of the overall U.S. population” are immigrants/their children. This is compared to 1850 where there were “2.2 million immigrants in the United States, representing almost 10 percent of the total population”. A closer look into the demographics of today’s immigrants reveals that most immigrants today are from Mexico, followed by India and then China. They found that the average age of immigrants now is older than the average age of the US population (43 verses 35). Of the entire foreign-born population, almost half identify as white and about a quarter as Asian.

The numbers alone are enough to show that America is still the ever growing melting pot it started out as. Lately in the media there has been more and more unrest between races in our country; an issue that should really be long behind us. The United States of America is very clearly so much more than just the Caucasian people who seemingly dominate the highest positions in society.  In the past year alone there has been so much unrest caused by racial tensions. These inextricable events show just how deeply some sentiments can be, and how not even years of progress can completely erase them.

It is a lot harder for immigrant Americans and first generation Americans to move up and through the rankings of society than it is for people who’ve been here for generations. This is partly because immigrants don’t have the connections or family legacy that more established citizens do, but another part of it is definitely directly due to their “newness,” naivety, and the way that the current American citizens view them. However, the same thing applies to people of color as well. And even immigrants who appear Caucasian but have a foreign accent will still suffer from whatever social stigma their differences seem to bring. In addition to this struggle, people often openly hate on Mexican immigrants in particular for coming and “taking jobs” from current citizens. I personally have mixed feelings on the issue because, yes they are taking jobs, but at the same time those are the morals on which America was built in the first place and who are we to try to shun people now?

Now, people like President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are people of color as well as immigrants/first generation. This just goes to show that yes, of course it is possible to defy the odds and come out on top. However, the amount of hard work needed and all of the obstacles you’d face are extreme. Going forward, hopefully these differences will lessen and be a lot less relevant in society. In order to achieve this we need flexible leaders who are willing to work for the change they want to see without being afraid of radical traditionalists. Of course, there are also situations where people just get lucky, but there’s still enough good in the world that talent and skill are usually recognized and duly rewarded – regardless of race, status, country of origin, or any other kind of bias.

http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested-statistics-immigrants-and-immigration-united-states

http://www.apa.org/pi/oema/resources/communique/2009/08/minority-leader.aspx

Throughout American history, immigrants have had to face very many different issues. I came across an article that touches on a lot of difficulties they’ve had to face categorized by different time periods and found it fascinating. With every new wave of people brings new challenges, customized by their preexisting cultures.

Starting with our founding fathers in the late 1700’s, the Alien and Sedition acts. This happened during a tense period in French history, when a lot of people were trying to find asylum here instead. However, these acts changed the amount of time needed to become a US citizen to a whole fourteen years (up from five), as well as allowing the president Jon Adams to deport anyone thought to be a “danger” to the United States By the turn of the century, this had died down quite a bit, but viciously sprung up again years later when the number of German and Irish immigrants spiked.

The aforementioned time frame is known as the Antebellum period. The German and Irish families were leaving their home countries for a number of reasons, including everything from famine to political repression. In the mid-1800’s some ignorant anti-immigrant Americans got together and formed the secret “Know-Nothings” political group. Despite all being children and grandchildren of immigrants themselves, the Know-Nothings believed that native born Americans such as themselves were markedly superior to the new immigrants to tended to be poorer than them and also Catholic. Throughout this time, Irish people became “economic scapegoats” when the economy got bad. This discrimination would not come to pass until after the Civil war when cultural communities became more established throughout the country.

In the industrial revolution, many immigrants came from Asia as well as Eastern and Southern Europe. The gold rush and many new railroad projects drew in millions of new immigrant workers, hoping to find a better life for themselves and their families. This upset a lot of people who felt that job opportunities were being taken away from current American citizens, sparking the Chinese Exclusion Act. From here through the 1920’s millions of immigrants came to America and formed cultural communities wherever they could in order to avoid discrimination and attacks by anti-immigrant mobs. During this time period, it is also estimated that over four million immigrants came over from Italy, and almost one million from the economically struggling and repressed Poland.

All this wasn’t bad enough, however. Anti-immigrant feelings peaked again after the First World War New laws put quotas on how many people from different countries could move here, and this heavily dampened immigration for quite some time. It was during this time that the “cultural communities” of previous eras became truly established and developed into what we are familiar with today: Chinatowns, Little Italy’s, Polish communities, etc. Many of the American soldiers who fought in WWII were the direct descendants of these immigrants and they served our country to their full capacity.

All of these are more legal challenges that immigrants had to face, not to mention the psychological aspect of leaving everything you’ve ever known behind to start your life over in a foreign land, and the emotional aspect of being physically rejected by the people of this new place. Immigration is still a hot-button topic today in the United States of America, and one would hope that people would be less prejudiced and against it than before, yet grand problems still exist. As new generations of immigrants enter into American life, many of the controversies and tensions evident in previous periods might again become apparent.

http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/primarysourcesets/immigration/pdf/teacher_guide.pdf

I went to a deliberation earlier this week on Penn State healthcare. Not sure exactly what this meant, I was intrigued by the topic (duh my passion blog is about medicine) and curious to see what exactly it’s all about. I also went to a deliberation on energy options in Pennsylvania, but that one was a while ago and I need to look for the paper they gave us…

Anyways, the group who did the Penn State healthcare deliberation had the following three approaches:

1. The fairness of paying for insurance
2. Responsibility and self-reliance
3. The efficiency of UHS (University Health Services)

In the first approach, the main question being asked was whether or not all students should be required to have health insurance, and who should be paying for the ones who can’t afford it. People mostly agreed that everyone should be required to be insured, however people were not in favor of shouldering the cost of people who are uninsured or can’t afford insurance. There should be a better way to do this so that something so necessary isn’t seen as such a burden and annoyance. Another thing mentioned during this approach was whether students with less pressing illnesses and injuries should be turned away from UHS. The discussion was overwhelmingly against this idea which could be dangerous for the individual and for the student body as a whole.

The second approach was the most well done in my opinion and was about who’s responsibility is it anyways. For example, the question of whether the university should put money towards advertising awareness of UHS/healthy habits as a preventative measure, or to simply put it into improving and furthering the current UHS services because their necessity is inevitable was raised. At this point in our lives, most of us realize how important our health is between eating right, taking care of our bodies, and working out. Many people who shirk these personal responsibilities have likely “accepted defeat” and given in to unhealthy lifestyles but it’s really never too late to turn things around. While the university should continue to promote awareness, I think more people would prefer they put more money towards improving and advancing their current services. Another thing that was discussed was incentives for being healthy, like getting a reward for going to the gym twenty days out of a month.

Lastly, the third approach on the effectiveness of UHS was more of a nice way to end by offering an opportunity for people to use their personal experiences to dictate their responses. A lot of people shared negative experiences and options for improvement were discussed. However, many also thought that the quality of the treatments and caregiving should not be sacrificed for efficiency. The students would rather wait for a longer period of time if it meant that other students were getting quality diagnoses and given correct dosages of medication. But at the end of the day someone brought up the fact that it’s actually a pretty awesome system and that, while it has its quirks, it runs exceptionally well to serve the 40,000+ students of University Park.

Overall I enjoyed this deliberation and found it to be successful. It took a while to get going at first because most college freshman don’t have a profound understanding of insurance and how it works, but after the ball got rolling, the discussion ran very well. All in all, a quality way to spend a Tuesday afternoon.

Two weeks ago y’all (yeah I really am from Texas) heard about my very not-diverse high school. Given a few minutes of free time during Spanish one day last year, my friend and I were actually pretty easily able to count all of the people who’d be considered minorities in our grade. At that point in my life I anticipated going to a relatively small University in a city that would be pretty diverse.

Clearly that wasn’t meant to be: Penn State is HUGE and in the middle of NOWHERE. And it’s also not very diverse. According to our Admissions Statistics webpage, the university as a whole is 68% white. The “largest minority” is the international students at 10.3%, but then every other traditional minority (Hispanic/Latino, Asian American, African American, Native American, mixed race, etc.) has a percentage of less than six. For such a renowned and prominent university, these statistics seem shocking. However, when you look at the country as a whole, you’ll find that in the class of 2013 somewhere between “20 to 45 percent of the nation’s public high school graduates were projected to be non-White, up by more than 7 percent of the class of 2009” (Joseph P. Williams, US News). So it looks like PSU’s actually doing quite alright if our minority enrollment is around 32%.

This brings us to Schreyer, which represents only 5% of Penn State students. Restricted to only three hundred incoming members each year, it’s actually pretty diverse. If you google “Schreyer Honors College demographics”, one of the things that comes up is our Wikipedia page, and one of the headings is actually “Diversity”. According to this page, there are scholars from about eleven different countries and forty different states. It’s hard to find more specific demographics than this just because Schreyer isn’t all that well known or big enough to have significant studies done on it, but this just helps to show that you can still have a lot diversity at a big state school. When I decided to come here, I took it one step further by applying to live in the GLOBE which is a special living option for students who are “interested in global issues”.

Luckily I was able to live here and am currently writing this from my lovely room in my bed (which is ten feet off the ground and requires a stool/jump to climb into). Being on this floor of Simmons has definitely introduced me to all sorts of people. It’s not only ethnically diverse, but also diverse in terms of types of people and different personalities and ways of living. Then, there’s also my randomly assigned roommate and next door neighbor who are both actually international students. My roommate Trishita is from India and my neighbor Alejandro is from Paraguay. Ironically I met and talked to both of them through the Schreyer 2018 Facebook page before school even started and was excited by these new kinds of people. I thought about how different and even scary this must be for them to be coming to live in a completely new and unknown world all by themselves. Not only are daily lives different in college compared to life at home, but there’s also the fact that life is so different in other countries as well – although I knew Alejandro was ready for it because one of the first things he ever asked me was if I was gonna party with him in college… Living in the GLOBE has been an amazing experience and I’ve made my best friends here on this floor. Not only do we get along as friends but it’s cool that we all had this interest in global cultures and diversity as well.

So after all that and going to the last college I ever imagined myself at, I can say I personally feel like I’ve found the best place to be. Penn State as a whole is fantastic, but this just goes to show that you can always take any situation and turn it into what you want, even if it wasn’t originally what you were looking for. Learning about new cultures and ideologies by putting yourself in new and potentially scary situations is always worth the risk of embarrassment because you’re educating yourself. Keep diversifying, State.

(PS – HELP, I don’t know if I’m actually writing about a civic issue/what issue it is. I feel like it might not be…)

http://admissions.psu.edu/apply/statistics/

http://www.usnews.com/news/college-of-tomorrow/articles/2014/09/22/college-of-tomorrow-the-changing-demographics-of-the-student-body

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schreyer_Honors_College

https://www.shc.psu.edu/life/housing/

Your grandparents live in a suburb in Pennsylvania. Your parents grew up in that suburb in Pennsylvania. You were born in and grew up in that suburb in Pennsylvania. You go to college just a few hours away from that suburb in Pennsylvania. And after you graduate, you’ll most likely move back to that same suburb in Pennsylvania. This is the story of a huge majority of the people I knew before college. Where I live (in a suburb in Pennsylvania), people are set in their ways because they’ve been there for so long. And it’s a well-known fact that my school district prefers hiring Penn State grads as teachers. The town has traditions, the kids all conform to the same social standards, and anyone who comes in from somewhere else is definitely going to stand out and be quite confused.

This is where I come in. I wasn’t born in Pennsylvania, my parents were not raised in the USA and half of my grandparents don’t even live on this continent. My grandparents live in India where my parents were both born and they were raised in that region of the world. After secondary school, their parents sent them here to get the best education they could. My parents were “those foreign students” in college and had to assimilate and figure out a whole new completely unfamiliar culture. Granted, this was almost thirty years ago and society was a lot less complicated, but it still had to have been extremely challenging. I know that some of my out-of-state friends here feel out of place at times, so it’s hard to imagine how much bigger the gap is for foreign students. But my parents did what anyone should do in a situation like this: they adapted. They observed, they participated, and they learned. After figuring out the college culture, they made decisions on whether or not to partake in certain aspects of it, and tried to take the best from the situations. After this they met and the rest is history, but then comes the challenge of having me and my little brother.

Because they were raised on the other side of the world, my parents’ values and priorities vary greatly from the average American’s. Of course, all you know is the way you were raised, so that’s how my brother and I were brought up. Starting from a young age I could tell something was different but it took me until middle school to figure out the cause. At that point I started to resent my parents for creating the innate differences between my classmates and myself. We fought bitterly throughout middle school as I tried to be like everyone else and fit in, like what every middle schooler wants, but they held true to their origins which only made me madder. After a long time they would eventually come to a compromise on some things, but this was a rare occasion. Something as silly as UGG boots that EVERYONE wore in middle school, they refused to buy for me. They said they were overpriced and that other boots are just as good, and that UGGs are just flat-out ugly. Seventh grade me vehemently disagreed and continued to ask for them. To this day I can’t say I’ve ever owned a pair of UGGs, but I did have a few knock-offs along the way. And honestly, I’m so glad that I never really had them because I haven’t worn what my mom calls my “fUGGlies” in years. They really are pretty ugly, warm as they may be, and it seriously would have been a waste of money on me. It’s the little moments like this, as well as the bigger things, that made me realize and appreciate all of the years my parents fought my ignorance and attempt at conformity.

I’ve often wondered if other children of immigrants have experienced this. I’ve seen very polarizing types: people who are beaten into submission by their parents’ native culture, and people resist it so much they break out of it completely. An article from Canadian Newcomer, while not technically about the US is still applicable to this situation. It says that “kids have two different worlds of expectations and possibilities. They have perspective on Canada [Or the USA], from both their peers and their parents, and definitely challenges arise.” It can also be that that first generation children live two different lives: “one with my parents, and another at school. Like me, children raised in two different cultures are bound to have conflict as they reach adulthood.” Trying to find the middle ground between cultural expectations and embracing a new country is a challenge that everyone involved in this kind of situation faces.

I’m the oldest child in my family, so I’m basically the guinea pig. I like to think that I paved the way for the smooth sailing my brother has had with my parents in the last few years. He never truly had to fight for them because I did it first. So the immigrant effect from them might’ve changed me, but I think it’s safe to say I changed them too. The Canadian article puts it the best: “Even with all of these difficulties, having immigrant parents connects children to their cultural background; and that’s something you can’t put a value on.”

When asked if I’m optimistic or pessimistic, I tend to take the easy way out and say, “neither, I’m realistic”. This is kinda a cop-out, but I think it works. It’s my way of avoiding saying pessimistic, because I consider myself to be a hoping for the best while expecting the worst kinda person. The pessimist in me would say that a lot of the time when I have an expectation for how an event or situation is going to go it doesn’t work out. But maybe that’s just because sometimes I have unrealistic expectations. So I came to the personal conclusion that maybe I just shouldn’t have expectations.

But then you realize there are situations when you need to have a positive attitude and high expectations. Like before medical procedures, people have actually proven that having a pessimistic outlook and negative expectations can actually affect your body chemistry for the worse. Then there’s also expectations with money. If you’re trying to sell your car that you think is worth $20,000, imagine how happy you would be if you were offered $21,000. The same goes the other way around; you would feel like you’re getting robbed if you were only offered $19,000.

When things go smoothly and either match or exceed our expectations, it makes us happy. This is because your brain releases the feel good hormone dopamine. Obviously this doesn’t happen when things don’t go according to plan, so we don’t feel good about those things. An article in the New York Times explains it perfectly: “If we expect to get x and we get x, there’s a slight rise in dopamine. If we expect to get x and we get 2x, there’s a greater rise. But if we expect to get x and get 0.9x, then we get a much bigger drop,” which also helps us understand why disappointment can seem much stronger than a fleeting moment of fulfillment.

Here’s the thing: human beings are dreamers, we want to be able to do it all, and a lot of the time it’s hard to accept the fact that we can’t. So does that mean we should strive for low expectations? If we have low expectations, then we can always exceed them and feel better about ourselves, right? But this crosses the border from realistic to pessimistic and is also just a sad and unfulfilling way to be living. The happiest and most personally successful people are the ones who are the most flexible with their expectations. They can adapt to their surroundings and anticipate the best way to go forward. Nothing ever really shakes them because they can handle whatever comes their way. So what I believe is that maybe the best way to go about it, hard as it may be, is to just expect the unexpected.

Spring blog topics:

Passion: sticking with medical advances

Civic issue: “immigrant event” and race relations

Welcome to our very professionally and respectably named English class! This is also the first work/assignment I’ve done this semester…..soo let’s see how this goes.

For my passion blog, I was thinking about keeping my topic. I really enjoyed writing about different medical advances and stories last semester, and it was a learning experience every week having to look up articles and reading several of them before deciding which one to write about. If I do switch it, I was maybe thinking about writing about my original idea: a travel blog of sorts relaying stories about the various trips and places I’ve been to. I was also considering doing a food blog, covering everything from international cuisines to dining commons’ food. Either way, these are all things that I truly enjoy and definitely would not mind writing about for the rest of the semester.

For my “this i believe” podcast, I was definitely kinda stuck when I tried to brainstorm ideas. What do I believe? What is it that I feel with enough conviction to write something like this? One thing I know I believe for sure is the power of expectations. Far more often than not I’ve found that having expectations for an upcoming event or situation usually has a profound impact on the event itself. For me at least, I’ve found that my expectations are always drastically different from reality. Expectations, which sometimes frivolous, are actually crucial to everyday life and person-to-person interaction. In my podcast essay I can explore the different types of expectations as well as what it means when your expectations differ so much from real life. Another thing I was considering writing about is the power of music. Anything music-related entails an incredible experience. You can play music, you can write music, you can create music, you can change music, you can listen to music, and above all you can enjoy and feel music.  The number of ways in which music impacts people’s lives is as infinite as the types and styles of music that are out there. Whether you consider your instrument to be a piano, a computer, or your throat (for singers) they are all equally influential, and whether you actually play an instrument or not has no bearing on the amount that you can enjoy and participate in music.

For my civic issues blog, I’ve been thinking about a rather roundabout way to write it. I’ve always been very interested in the differences between any given people and I think that one of the largest contributors to differences in humanity is our upbringing. I was thinking that I could write about different people and the way they were raised and the subsequent effects that they think it has had on their lives and moral opinions (but I’m not sure if this counts/works as a civic issue….it kind of could because personal opinions can tie into many different things and involve many hot-button topics, but it’s very indirect overall). Another similar thing is the “immigrant event” and race relations in America. Being the first generation of my family to grow up in America made for a very different and multi-faceted childhood that I know I definitely attribute to who I am today. In this blog I could talk about the way that people feel when they move to America, the polar opposite ways that their children can develop, and the consequences that this has on their native culture.

Stay sylly everybody. After all, this is RCL II: RCL Harder, the Morning After.

During her time at Penn State, Adichie said, “I would say, do different things. And I guess I would also say, listen. And I mean that in all kinds of ways. I think that this is a culture and a generation that doesn’t do a lot of listening, and I would say, if possible, listen more than you talk,” when asked about advice to give current freshman students. And I think this is such crucial advice. Firstly, college is a time to reinvent yourself, try new things, and put yourself out there in ways you never even imagined before. This speaks to what she said about doing things differently. You also get the opportunity to meet so many new kinds of people and you can either judge them and dismiss your differences, or embrace them and learn from them. This plays a lot into the second thing she said about listening rather than speaking. This is definitely a huge problem that our generation has, and the first step to overcoming any large issue to recognize it. Next, we have to collectively actually do something about it.

Another thing Adichie said that stuck with me is when she said: “In general, I don’t think any work of art is perfect. Nothing is ever really finished. Creative work by its very nature is unfinished.” Now that I’ve heard it, I completely agree with this statement, but would never have thought of this myself. Art has many forms: drawings, paintings, poems, songs, essays, novels, etc. But each of these things is unique and was created with an equally distinctive purpose. All art forms are subjective and not one can be marked “perfect” or “finished” because beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder. There is a free domain about art; anyone can add to or change any painting or song or story, but doing so never actually changes the original piece.

Lastly, Adichie said, “People would say things to me like, “How did you become like that?” I don’t know I’m even like, this is who I am. If I had to invent an answer to your question, it would be my upbringing, my parents. There’s a sense, growing up in a space where you feel safe, loved, and you’re given… And I think there’s something wonderful about just having the space where you can be who you are. And I think that’s what it is. My sense of self, I think, is very deeply rooted in family, and also, really, in a certain sense, in culture, as well.” This stuck with me because it’s very reminiscent of what I wrote my Common App essay on for college applications! I chose the general prompt and proceeded to write about the people and experiences that have shaped my views and personality, which largely connects to what Adichie says here. I also strongly attributed everything to my parents and the upbringing they gave me, and it was really cool to see Adichie do the same.

The first time I heard that we were going to have to give a TED Talk, panic set in. I’ve always been very anxious regarding public speaking, and this took it to a whole new level by being the longest and also the only completely memorized speech I’ve ever given. Somehow, don’t ask how, I pulled this together in a relatively short amount of time considering how long we’ve had this assignment on our radars, and I think it actually turned out pretty well!

After watching the video, I think that the talk itself went well. I did do a one thing slightly out of order because I had forgotten it in the place it should’ve gone, but other than that, I managed to get everything out. I realized that I did use a decent amount of conversational crutches such as “like” and “um,” but that can only go away with practice and more experience. In conversation, I tend to talk with my hands, and now looking at it in a presentation setting, it looks kind of awkward. Pointing at the screen and highlighting things on the powerpoint were fine, but the smaller random gestures I made while speaking look a little uncomfortable and almost distracting. But this also is something that just needs more time and experience to refine.

Going first was absolutely terrifying; I hadn’t seen anyone else’s official talks and had no idea how mine would stack up after the fact. But after presenting, it was so nice and I was able to relax so much more than I would have if I had gone later in the list. To be completely honest, put off picking a topic for so long because I just didn’t know what to do. This was the first idea that really struck me as a big shift that would have substantial facets to talk about. Through this, I found that I was able to talk about the origin, current state of, and even extrapolate to the future of this shift.

Check it out for yourself if you’d like!