<p>
Sinners Alley, over in the Cafe. Not sure about billboards – not that I ever looked for them. Ask the marmots – they know everything.</p>
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jym, I responded with, "Chacun a son g</p>
<p>Something was definitely lost in translation.</p>
<p>
Actually, once Columbia_Student pointed that out, it was trivial to replicate the result (student’s name and location) from just a small handful of posts in the OP’s history. 100% confirmation – of course nothing is 100% in the online world. But there are enough unique characteristics identified in a small combination of posts to make the careful reviewer pretty certain of a positive identification.</p>
<p>For obvious reasons, I’m being vague about what information is so unique. For the OP’s kiddo, this was unfortunate but hopefully not damaging or threatening. For the rest of us, this is a good reminder to be more vague about the details of our kiddos’ backgrounds and our own – threads for “parents of X kind of kids” seem so cozy when we’re in our offices or living rooms, but online we never know who’s looking.</p>
<p>Wow, this is very confusing, with people referring to deleted posts. Could someone please clarify without breaching anyone’s privacy- is the OP related to (or the same as) POIH, and is the “DD” on the title of this thread the same as POIH’s daughter?</p>
<p>I just want to know, because the two kids seemed to be remarkably similar to me when I first read this thread.</p>
<p>About the privacy issue, I really think people should refrain from “outing” individuals that they recognize here.</p>
<p>
According to a post on this thread from ParentofIvyHope, it appears that Columbia<em>Student did just that some time ago, to no avail. I don’t fault Columbia</em>Student, really – the information Columbia_Student posted was vague enough to avoid detection by anything automatic, easy for the student in question to clean up, and cleared from the forum in under 24 hours. Pretty well done imho, point made with very few individuals made aware of the other party’s identity as a result (and I’m assuming, perhaps naively, that most of us here neither recall nor care about this family’s identity).
There are a lot of us who just like to yuk it up, period. :D</p>
<p>Must say I’m not too keen on the “only mistake… trusting” wording here.</p>
<p>The OP provided the detailed information necessary to make “outing” her daughter a trivial matter. No mistake of her own?</p>
<p>CC parents treated her question seriously at first, then piled onto one another with mostly light-hearted jokes that had virtually nothing to do with the OP – only with the topic posed in the question. Untrustworthy?</p>
<p>This is why CC carries a warning in its ToS that says to be careful what you post. Ten years ago, Scott McNealy said, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” Much as we might hate the notion, he was right – at least, when we publish a truckload of personal information in places that are freely, publicly, anonymously available worldwide.</p>
<p>We already know how this has complicated life for our teens. It complicates life for us, too. IMHO Columbia_Student displayed more sensitivity about this than some parents do about their own kids.</p>
<p>OK, that’s as much seriousness as I can take on a workday. owlice, I hope you get that massage soon, and many thanks for the Luzianne. It goes down great with donuts! Is it ok to get the ones with colored sprinkles, or are those too gauche? Should I stick with the chocolate-sprinkled ones? And toneranger – What color frosting (from the inevitable smudges) would go best with the aqua shirt I’m wearing today? I want to be sure to make the very best impression on whoever sees me scarfing them in the car on the way home!</p>
<p>
Ooooooh, taffy… even better! Let me roll up my sleeves and give you a hand with that! :p</p>
<p>:: rushes into the dark room ::</p>
<p>Oh, dear, how silly of me to go off to do things like take my kid to the store, have dinner, and then make a Home Depot run for the doorsets and faucets the handyman is coming to install today!</p>
<p>I missed pulling taffy!!</p>
<p>geek_mom, I’m so sorry to have left you…</p>
<p>:: turns on the overhead light ::</p>
<p>:: looks around ::</p>
<p>Wow. geek_mom, let’s … ah… let’s get you cleaned up and get some coffee into you!</p>
<p>Oh dear, oh dear. No, no, of course I’m not taking pictures; that snapping you hear is the taffy! You’re covered in it!</p>
<p>I’m so sorry!</p>
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</p>
<p>I followed the breadcrumbs, feeling a little creepy about it all the way, but mostly out of curiosity about this family’s cultural background and how it might have framed the OP’s original question.</p>
<p>Same here TK, especially when I read this very thoughtful post from happymomof1 in response to a question about why Asians seem preoccupied with college rankings. I don’t know whether this thread’s OP is Asian or a different ethnicity, but she indicated that she is not originally from the U.S. nor a native English speaker. I think that happymom’s insights are worth considering:</p>
<p>"Many immigrant parents (not just those coming from Asia) come from societies where the university that you graduate from determines the job you will be able to get, and the job you will get on graduation will determine the quality of your life and of your family’s life for the rest of your life. Consequently, as described by Greybeard, they are very conscious of the ranking of schools.</p>
<p>"However, in the US we have a lot more social mobility. Compared to those other countries, it is unbelievably easy to change careers in the US. We can re-start our lives as many times as we want to. We can change majors in college. We can transfer credits from one college to another. If we don’t “get it right” the first, or second, or third, or whatever-number-it-is time, we can start over again.</p>
<p>"This is essentially what these immigrant parents came to the US for - a chance to re-start. However, they are working with their original tool set. Like the HS principal who told my college roommate “That school must be no good, I’ve never heard of it.”, these parents have a limited list of schools that they’ve heard of, and that their friends and family back home would recognize the names of. If a place isn’t on that list (and how many foreign universities have you heard of?), at least if it is on someone’s list (like in the USNWR rankings) well then it must be “good”.</p>
<p>“Changing cultures is not a trivial act. There is so much that we just don’t get, and that we never will really truly get, about life in that new environment. That these parents get as much about life in the US as they do is a credit to them. What is unfortunate, is that too many of them don’t get just a bit more. Happydad is an immigrant. He went to grad school in the US so his understanding of the system here is decent, but we do have almost daily conversations about how things work here as opposed to how they work there and just exactly why his approach is not gonna work here. When neither parent understands the system (this is equally true for immigrant parents and for US parents who have never gone to college), things will be difficult for the child who is getting ready to think about a career and preparing to apply to college.”</p>
<p>gadad, I think all of that is very true. The attitudes presented by this family in many threads are ones that have a cultural basis that many of us don’t understand or are not coming from ourselves. I think it is hard for such famllies to adjust to the system and attitudes here. But ultimately, for their kids to be able to mesh into our society, they need to start understanding THIS system because their kids are going to have to function within it. </p>
<p>I worry about a wonderfully accomplished teenager, like the D of this family, who may have to contend with when she gets to college that her parents publicly discussed moving with her to school and hoping she’d go to a school where she could hobnob with more snobs and so on, and have so much else public along with the child’s and parent’s own webpages, that she may be embarrassed when she gets to college about others knowing some of these things.</p>
<p>Wow, great thoughts gadad and happymom.</p>
<p>The wonderful thing about the Internet is that somebody can probe these issues behind a cloak of anonymity. So we are right to be sensitive about “outing” some poor HS kid; yet, it is natural to be curious about the family bground so we can understand and be more helpful.</p>
<p>It is incredibly brave to be willing to pose very personal questions to a community of complete strangers who grew up speaking a different language, to expose yourself to ridicule not to mention an invasion of privacy.</p>
<p>In addition to the difference between our college system and foreign systems, another set of factors involves issues of poverty, class and social connections. I’m familiar with one Asian country in which millions of people are one generation away, or one job placement away, from horrible grinding poverty. War, famine, political oppression are in living memory. The recent family history may include a crisis in which a personal connection to someone with power, money or influence made the difference between life and death, or at least between living a miserable life or a comfortable one.</p>
<p>Of course, we really do not know. It’s possible the OP is a just a crass boorish social climber. The trail I followed suggests otherwise.</p>
<p>This discussion has really struck a nerve with me. The situation of the D in this case reminds me in so many ways of what my mother, who is also a first generation American, endured. Her family was poor, so college was never an option for her. However, she refused to spend her teen years searching for a husband or take an “acceptable” job like a secretary, as her pateral grandmother essentially ordered her to do. She chose a career in fashion merchandising and was promptly ostracized from her family. She compounded her sins by marrying my father (same race, same religion, but wrong ethnicity) and continuing to work after her marriage simply because she loved her job. She only reconciled with the family after my birth, and that occurred because they felt that she had finally come to her senses and was doing what a woman was supposed to do.</p>
<p>My mother seldom speaks of this incident and says only that “it was the times” that made them do this. However, her friends and my father’s family have discussed with me in great detail what happened to her and how horribly she was treated. It angers me to no end that my brilliant and talented mother was rejected by the people who were supposed to love her the most simply because she chose to follow a different path.</p>
<p>I would have more sympathy for the OP had her D chosen a local community college over Princeton. However, the list of schools to which her D was accepted would make any reasonable parent burst with pride. Moreover, her D was attending, by her standards, an elite private school which probably took great pains to walk the parents through the college admissions process - I know the school that my D attended did that, and I’m sure that hers is no exception. It is extremely difficult for me to believe that, given this family’s situation and the D’s educational opportunities, the OP actually believed that MIT is a “tech school” on the level of some place like DeVry Institute. </p>
<p>It seems to me that the OP’s only objection to MIT is that her overseas relatives have never heard of it and couldn’t possibly be impressed by it. Towards that end, I suggest that OP photocopy every article, every national ranking, and every other piece of information pertaining to MIT and mail it to the folks back home. Perhaps then the D will be able to attend the school she wants and choose her own path rather than having one chosen for her based on purely specious reasoning.</p>
<p>Well said, tk, gadad and happymom. I also think it incredibly brave of the OP to have asked an honest question. As for the answers, well, I don’t think most of the posts here are going to upgrade the deservedly poor esteem most Asians have for Occientals. People like owlice should indeed remain in the intellectual scullery they belong in. As for the OP’s daughter, if she has managed to master the American system well enough to have been admitted to many of the top schools in the country, I don’t think she’ll have much of a problem coming to terms with her parents’ naivety or with meeting the right people (whether students or professors) to help her achieve her dreams.</p>
<p>Post 393 danced around, but came close to, another cultural difference --which is the very last paragraph. In my highly American family by virtue of adopted & affirmed values (although my father was First Generation), it would be inconceivable to allow the opinions of relatives of one’s native background (such as one’s relatives by nationality overseas) to determine the ultimate college decision, or to weigh heavily in that decision. That would include, by the way, whether those overseas opinions reflected accurate facts or inaccurate mythology. (In other words, we wouldn’t have wasted time sending “national rankings” or “news clippings” in an effort to win the approval of distant relatives.)</p>
<p>It’s always ironic to me when people seek the approval or blessings of those with very limited knowledge.</p>
<p>Intelligence isn’t just understanding the molecular properties of whatever, it’s also being able to be flexible and change in different situations. I have always thought it ironic that the same people who pride themselves on smarts as defined by book-learning / test scores and things of that nature don’t seem to have the ability to understand that the culture here isn’t like their home cultures. </p>
<p>If I moved to Asia and thought that I should get into college there because of my stellar extracurriculars and volunteering at the old-age home … well, then I’d be pretty stupid, because the game there is played on stats and stats only. I would be able to recognize that the rules of engagement were different than in the US. I don’t know why the converse isn’t true. </p>
<p>The other point I’ll make is that in terms of hobnobbing with snobs, which I’ll rename to elite young adults, cultured and perhaps already having some family money – the DD is clearly quite gifted academically and is a research geek (said as the utmost in compliments, my children should only have such brain power). Research geekdom, though, is not the social currency of the elite. The true elites in America draw their elite-itude from social class and influence (think High WASP and the like), not from raw brain power and research abilities per se.</p>
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Just as long as you don’t tag them with my name when you post them on Facebook! If you do that, owlice, I’ll have to hunt you down and… and… hem your sleeves crooked, above your elbows!</p>
<p>Scullery… scullery… makes me think of crullers. Yummy! Are they more socially correct than ordinary donuts? Can anyone recommend a good tea to go with them?</p>
<p>@tranquil218’s point regarding selections based on specious reasoning: Folks here might be surprised at the number of international students I’ve worked with who were on the edge of being completely cut off from their families for rejecting arranged marriages based strictly on social status… and the number who acquiesced simply to avoid the conflict. Some of the stories are heart-breaking, including that of a young lady who aborted a child she wanted so that she could follow through with a marriage that her parents wanted, so that her mother would stop screaming on the phone that she (the young lady) was “killing” her (the mother, who was referring to the marriage, not the child). Some are just sort of pointless, including that of a brilliant, hard-working, charming young man who took a month off to fly home for Christmas and spent the whole time hearing from multiple family members about what a terrible son and nephew he is because he decided that he’d rather not marry his cousin after all, since he was never in love with her and his heart lies elsewhere. He knew what to expect; he goes back time and again, with gifts and money, because he’s the eldest. His father won’t speak to him or acknowledge his presence.</p>
<p>@Lost, with all due respect and all appropriate contrition for my “Occi[d]ental”-ness… stories like that one don’t do much to “upgrade” my esteem for people of any culture who measure the worth of others as a function of their relative positions in a caste system.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl has a good point… If the OP’s daughter is going to hang with “that” crowd, the question she’ll hear on introductions is, “So, what do your parents do?”</p>
<p>And now, thanks to owlice’s copious skill with a digital camera, geek_son can be prepared for this question: “She, uh, well… this is kind of embarrassing, but… aw heck, she’s my mom! She pulls taffy, and I’m d@mn proud of it!”</p>
<p>Back story on the taffy references, please?</p>
<p>^ Pizzagirl, there isn’t really a back story that I’m aware of, although there may well be references to a taffy pull in some other thread I haven’t read. If you haven’t read this one from start to finish… most of it consists of goofy jokes and free associations in the spirit of the meta-thread.</p>
<p>In the first 40 or so posts, there were some serious answers to the original post and some suggestions (mine included) that the OP might be ■■■■■■■■ (which now seems unlikely). Somebody posted something on the order of, “This thread should be entertaining, think I’ll pull up a chair and have some popcorn.” And that started us off on various foods (snobbish and more down-home). That’s one of the thread’s recurring themes – along with moonshine, rubbing elbows, and social climbing.</p>
<p>Bottom line: We were just being ridiculous. Most of it, in fact, had little or nothing to do with the original post – which is why there was so much speculation as to when the thread would get locked, or moved to the cafe. The thread didn’t take a really serious turn until somewhere around post #330. Oh, sure, once in a while some renegade would pop in and post some serious response… but the rest of us would somehow manage to yank it back off track again.</p>
<p>Given the apparent barriers in culture and language, it might all have been rather strange and confusing for the OP.</p>
<p>PS: historymom posted a nice summary up to post #260-ish: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1062259091-post260.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1062259091-post260.html</a></p>
<p>(And historymom, I love toot sweets and quite agree with you! ;))</p>