Carnegie Mellon and Rice are matches where I’m pretty sure I can get in. “So, Binghamton and Rochester are the safeties, which is great, because I’d be totally thrilled to go to both. He pulled up a spreadsheet on his phone with the names of 11 colleges listed in color-coded columns. But I absolutely think that our generation’s willingness to discuss the hard topics of race and class and privilege will eventually lead to a satisfactory solution for everybody, even beyond college admissions.” “I believe the existence of affirmative action reflects the countless historical injustices that have led to such a complex situation, and any single person or perspective, much less a short photo caption, can’t possibly capture its nuances. Education: Yale University, class of 2023. He had a look of mild agitation about him, one that never really subsided. He walked through the front door a moment later - thin, with short-cropped hair, a neatly tucked button-up shirt and creaseless pants. I was hungry and slightly irritated, so I texted him and said I’d meet him at a Cuban lunch counter nearby. When I arrived, I saw that it had no tables or booths, just three stools pushed up against the front window. Alex suggested a Dunkin’ Donuts exactly one door down from his internship office. We finally settled on a meeting in the financial district. “Well, that’s you,” Alex said, a bit scornfully. My flexible schedule wasn’t a favor to him but simply a reflection of the life of a relatively productive adult. And yet, despite these various jobs (as well as the fact that I wasn’t on summer vacation), I could meet him on any day and at any time for however long he pleased. There just was no time.Īfter Alex canceled our first agreed-upon date, I told him that in addition to writing for The New York Times Magazine, I was also writing a book, ran a small production company and had an 18-month-old daughter. Deep into the summer vacation before his last year of high school, Alex had been interning in the office of Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou while also completing a study on congressional legislators with a professor at New York University. When I first met him in early August 2018, we struggled to find a time to meet up to talk about his thoughts on affirmative action and its effect on Asian-American students. In the specific yet ultimately abstracted and perhaps inhuman calculations particular to selective college admissions, Alex is a first-generation (considered a plus), middle-class (minus) Chinese-American (minus, arguably) with two college-educated parents (minus) from a major American city (minus) with aspirations to study either computer science (minus, given all the Asians who want to go into STEM disciplines) or political science (plus). They live along with Alex’s little brother in a modest apartment in outer Queens. His parents, Qiao and Su, emigrated from China in the ’90s and worked their way through commuter colleges in Queens. Clever girl coalition agreement querious free#In his free time, he plays Pokémon and goes on long jogs through Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. (“the first hackathon for teens in Long Island”), a member of the cross-country team, the vice president of the school’s painting club, the president of the Get Your Life Together club (visitors from various businesses come talk to students) and the senator for his homeroom. Alex is also the vice president of technology for the Bronx Science chapter of the National Honor Society, the director of graphics and marketing for TeenHacks L.I. For the purposes of this article, Alex Chen, an 18-year-old senior at the Bronx High School of Science in New York City, is the “typical Asian student.” Alex has a 98 percent average at one of the city’s elite public high schools, scored a 1,580 on the SAT and, as far as he knows, has earned the respect of his teachers.
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