This is exactly privilege speaking. Starving Artists/Musicians/Humanities/Literature major are practically a meme and have become a cautionary tale on what to avoid until you have established yourself financially. Whether it is fair or not, life does not reward them in today's economic system (ignore outliers). Hence the need for "safe and boring" jobs like Doctor/Engineer/Lawyer/anything else that helps you earn money to lead a "boring" life.
I'm not disagreeing with you here, but how is that even relevant in this discussion? This was about the path students from a high-level school took.
It may be boring to you, and that is ok, but it does not negate the fact that it is a challenging field and demands immense hard work to be one.
I'm white British and would rather call them different attitudes.
(I'll also be the first to joke about 'PC gone mad 'differently abled'' etc. - that's not my point here - it's not out of an abundance of caution or respect for all, I just think, honestly, yeah, why not push your children into something they don't enjoy but is high-paying, professional, and comfortable? There are reasons 'why not', of course, but also 'why'; so it's a different attitude, not 'backward', unless you only mean to say 'out of favour'.)
You miss the entire point of the article. You are privileged not only to have Americanized parents, but you are privileged because you are an American. Your world is way better than that of a common Indian student. Most Indian students need a job, just to be able to feed their families. Quoting from the article:
"When push comes to shove (which is the permanent state for most Indians), we only care about one thing, survival."
When it's about survival, everything else goes out the window. That's one of the points the article is trying to highlight.
What does is say about a person if their attitude is that these things are okay if you are from a certain background? It says that they care about the background of the person more (for whatever reason, good or bad) than the damage it does to the communities that they interact with. Consider the consequences of this.
I am in no way encouraging hacky ways for resume grooming. I am just stating why it is a phenomena in India. You're doing a good job by not employing these tactics to further yourself. Also, a key difference could be that you're maybe not from India. And if you are, you're an exception not the norm.
This right here is the truth. The article is simply a rant from somebody who has yet to grow up and understand the real world i.e. they are in a privileged position in life. When you have so much competition for limited opportunities, you cannot apply the same yardstick from a different environment. The Fight for Survival is as true of social structures as it is in biological ones. It seems this Indian American has no idea of the sacrifices his parents made in establishing themselves in America and providing him the privileged position from which he pontificates.
Any Indian with access to a computer can potentially be a (much) better hire than the one from the most desired engineering college. In fact, I’d almost have to expect so since they don’t have to waste time on all that signalling.
It’s unfortunate that that apparently doesn’t matter to the companies doing the hiring :/
Quoting from the article:
"In middle school children have dreams to become a Pilot in the airforce, or maybe a Police officer, or maybe a Opera Singer ! But by the time of high school, everyone is just either on road to become an Engineer, a Doctor, a Lawyer, a Chartered Accountant …. or a failure. This may seem harsh but that’s how most of the society operates here in India."
The problem here is that students are forced by their parents into a field of education they don't even like. How do you expect someone to understand the intricacies of fluid dynamics when they don't give a rat's ass about it. When you give exams on topics you are not even remotely interested in? Therein lies the privilege of being American. When you're a common Indian student, you don't have a choice in choosing your field of study
>> Any Indian with access to a computer can potentially be a (much) better hire than the one from the most desired engineering college.
This only works well for computer science. What about students who want to become doctors? Do you know that to get a seat in an Indian medical college, a common Indian student will most likely have to pay a "donation" just to get their foot in the door.
The same way I studied everything in high school? I certainly didn’t give a fuck arout the molecular mass of hydrogen, but since I was going to be there anyway, I might as well spend my time there actually learning instead of sleeping.
It’s unfortunate if that situation continues into university, but hardly the end of the world.
And then from university, goes on to become your career. On, which you spend 1/3 of your day for 40 years.
And please do elaborate on why/how a career in medicine boring?
Asians with far better scores are deemed to be less worthy due to "uninteresting personalities" than others far less qualified.
I don't think it's difficult to understand why the children of people motivated enough to emigrate for better opportunities would themselves be ambitious and would want to establish themselves with stable, high performing careers (having almost no generational wealth to fall back on.)
In my experience, the prestige of a college definitely correlates with how rewarding your time at college is going to be.
Of course, the career I chose just happened to be programming, so it did end up that way.
Also, if scores were the only reason to enroll a student, people from poor background, especially black and Latinos would basically never get in.
There is cutting-edge research and also pretty boring business app development. Also, some jobs are pretty specialized and not the sort of thing you can get as a generic software engineer.
A PhD from Caltech in machine learning and optimization doesn't sound very different from being a doctor if we're speaking of conventional (read: boring) career paths
So he chose the highly unconventional path of PhD in STEM. After finishing it he would chose uncustomary and also forward looking job at FAANG.
While the Untermenschen from his school mates of indian origin chose to become doctors or did not persue the much forward looking career in TE.
How did they not get filtered out during residency?
Years later, my cousin laughingly confided in me that he had access to all the old exams that were just questions shuffled around through the years. He got them through his campus Indian student group. I confirmed this with some other people I knew in that group, all of who treated it like common knowledge. Changed the way I saw and interacted with people I’ve known my whole life. Certainly changed the way my ex felt about those haunting exam scores.
My personal take? Residencies have n spots. The people qualified to succeed in those spots is n * y (where y > 2). It may be that people who cheat to get into a residency were qualified to do the job, but it doesn’t mean they deserved to be there. This can be true in a lot of other positions that require the applicant to jump through different hoops.
Only shared with fellow Indians?
How does an unaffiliated student get access to those prior year exams? Fortunately, the internet is levelling this somewhat.
When teaching at a college level, I used to go out of my way to provide any historical resources. I want my class to be fair to everyone involved.
I also used to redraft my exams and assignments every single year. This is quite a lot of work and a lot of professors simply won't do it. However, if you don't, then some students will take advantage of it, and your class isn't being fair to everyone.
Though in both cases, I think it's on the question asker (either teacher or interviewer) to make sure that questions change up frequently enough and aren't easy to study without having genuine understanding.
It just means the method of interviewing is flawed.
It's common for professors to not allow students to keep exams for this reason. Students in such classes do a "brain dump" by writing down all the questions they remember immediately after leaving the test to get around this.
"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles."
But I am not sure about the accuracy. There are other reports with similar or lower numbers.
Wildly different experience depending on the state and part (South is good in comparison to North).
There is a shortage of doctors despite everyone aiming for a medical degree. It is worse in rural areas so there are less qualified people treating others. Pseudoscience and pseudomedicine is a big industry too. Actors, news channels, babas, politicians, etc all encourage it.
The most recent example of above is baba ram dev's covid cure: https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2020/aug/05/covid-19...
He promoted his pseudoscience on multiple news channels as a cure for covid. Ayush ministry (which is a branch of government to regulate/approve pseudomedicine) stopped him on some advertising basis so he rebranded the thing to covid immunity booster.
Do you really think 90% of Americans doing CS are not doing because of an easy FAANG job ? That they had some deep passion for CS since long ?
Unfortunately the reason here is definitely cultural. I was lucky that my parents didn't force me to become an engineer or doctor (though it was by choice) but for majority of my friends since 9th std, it was about getting into IIT and their whole life and their whole parent's world revolve around getting a good job in a top MNC and that's the Indian version of American dream.
Unfortunately the competition is fierce and there are 10 candidates for every spot, so you buff, cheat, cut corners and do everything in your power to get ahead. Because if you don't the other person still will and he will take your spot (it's like SEO).
There is an amazing web series called Kota factory. If you want to understand the culture it offers some great insights into it in a very entertaining way!