A Program At Edmonds Community College

As a first-generation Asian-American college student and the first in my family to move onto higher education, my chances of academic success were improbable.

The first two years in Missouri are the nightmare. We have a high expectation on the life of the America, but the reality is always cruel. Just like all the immigrants, we, as the Chinese immigrants, were facing a fundamental

D.L.is a 63-year-old Asian American female who was immigrated to the United States from Nepal six years ago as a Bhutanese refugees. She lived 20 years of her life as a refugee where she struggled everyday to provide food and other needs to her children. Finally, in 2010 she moved to the United States with her family. Making resettlement decisions was not very easy for her, yet she did for the betterment of her children and grandchildren future. D.L. said, “I was dismayed and distressed. It was not easy to adjust, adapt, and integrate in the foreign land with no educational experience”. D.L. had arranged marriage with her husband 49 years ago at the age of 13. She never got opportunity to attend school because she had responsibility of family, therefore she cannot speak English language. She has four daughters and three sons. In present time, she along with her husband are living with their middle son. She does not work but have social security and food stamps.

Many new arrivals still struggle to survive and often Chinese Americans still encounter suspicion and hostility. Chinese Americans have achieved great success and now, like so many others, they are stitching together a new American identity. As Michelle Ling, a young Chinese American, tells Bill Moyers in Program 3, “I get to compose my life one piece at a time, however I feel like it. Not to say that it’s not difficult and that there isn’t challenge all the time, but more than material wealth, you get to choose what you are, who you are.” (www.pbs.org)

I first heard about Concordia University Irvine’s ABSN program through my cousin Ana Versigan who is a graduate from the program. My cousin greatly admired Concordia’s ABSN program and she highly advised me to apply for the program. The ABSN program at CUI immensely prepared Ana for her career as a nurse. CUI provided small classes and opportunities to interact with the professors which cannot be said about other schools. She was able to make connections with her professors and received exceptional help from her professors and worked in groups with her classmates. With the education and help from the professors, she was prepared for interviews where she performed remarkably well and was offered multiple positions. Ana’s exemplary success due to her educational background at Concordia fiercely encouraged my decision to apply for CUI’s ABSN program. I believe that I would make an exceptional addition to CUI’s ABSN program because I believe that I have qualities and characteristics that make me a strong fit for a career in nursing.

made it possible for herself to go to college and get a law degree. "I want to go the

Growing up in China, I will be able to view some things from a different perspective. The analytical skills that I gained from double majoring in political science and economics further equip me with the ability to analyze the difference between the U.S. and China. I can bring these viewpoints to Michigan Law and discuss them with my peers and scholars. I believe that through this process, I would be able to contribute to the diversity of Michigan

In our new book, The Asian American Achievement Paradox -- based on a survey and 140 in-depth interviews of the adult children of Chinese, Vietnamese and Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles -- fellow sociologist Min Zhou and I explain what actually fuels the achievements of some Asian American groups: U.S. immigration law, which favors highly educated, highly skilled immigrant applicants from Asian countries.

Lau, along with many other Chinese-American students in San Francisco found their school district did not do its job in providing equal opportunity to students in this circumstance. This resulted in a landmark court case

The organization I chose is my current workplace, and that of five years, Rogue Community College (RCC). Established in 1970, RCC serves residents in Jackson and Josephine counties at eight different learning centers in Grants Pass, Medford, White City and the Illinois Valley. A non-profit, comprehensive, two-year, public community college, RCC offers six two-year degrees, 73 career and technical training programs, 22 Career Pathways certificates; and a variety of workforce and short-term training, academic skills, and continuing and community education classes; plus, services to the businesses community. One of 17 community colleges in Oregon, RCC is accredited by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities. We have a current Board of Education with less than ten members, have less than one hundred full time faculty instructors, and nearly six-hundred-part time instructors. Our funding levels are currently split between student and state funding. Our administration is a compilation of one President and three Vice Presidents. One Vice President of Student Services (chief student services officer), one Vice President of Instructional Services (chief academic officer) and one Vice President of College Services (chief informational officer). We have nearly ten thousand credit students and around seven thousand non-credit students. Fifty-six percent are women and forty-four percent are male, with the average age of thirty-two.

Attending Wallace State Community College was really a no brainer for a myriad of reasons. It has been sixteen years since I attended high school. Since then, I have used practically none of the math that I learned in my high school years. Now, I have to relearn that math in order to put me on the path of obtaining my Bachelor’s degree in History and following that up with law school at either the Cumberland School of Law at Samford or the Birmingham School of Law. The math program at Wallace is said to be easier as it includes less math that would only be used if I was trying to put a man on the moon. Add the convenience of riding to school with my beautiful wife because she already attends Wallace; coupled with having a smaller sized school and cheaper tuition just puts icing on the cake and beer in my mug.

Lisa Lowe, a professor of English and American Studies at Tufts University, boasts many accreditations to her name. She holds her PhD. in Literature from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and her B.A. in History from world-renowned Stanford University. In 1996, Duke University Press published her book Immigration Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. In Immigrant Acts, Lowe discusses the contradictions in society where Asian Americans have been included in the workplace and markets of the U.S., but are often distanced from the ground of the national culture via exclusion laws and bars from citizenship.

After a year living here, she realized the “America Dream” would not come true, if she does not go to the school and get a career. So she did it!. she started taking two classes at night, then three. After almost 6 years she finally graduated with a degree in Hospitality Management. Then she starts working as a banquet's supervisor at the hotel Holiday Inn in Stamford, Ct. After a little while, she was promoted to banquet manager. Mery made a tremendous effort doing all this, but at the end she felt that it was worth it. Now she has a better life than before, and she can give her family the stability that they need. She said that immigrating with her family was not easy, because she had more responsibilities than others, but it did not stop her and they were the reason that pushed to achieve her dream.

Elizabeth Wong is a Chinese-American playwright who wrote “The Struggle to Be an All-American Girl”. In her essay, she describes her resentment of her Chinese roots and her protest against her parents who want her to learn and appreciate her heritage and culture. Her essay exposes the pressure that society places on immigrant children to fit into the dominant culture. The proposed solutions to fixing this problem is thinking and implementing long term plans. I make the argument that his ethical problem of society placing such a heavy burden on immigrant children to fit into the dominate culture can be solved with the implementation of multicultural classes, language classes, additional counselors and child psychologists in public schools.

Thanks to California Proposition 209 in 1996, which prohibits state institutions from considering race, sex, or ethnicity specifically in the areas of public employment and public education, Asian American enrollment rates in the University of California system remained stable at a rate of around 40 percent. In contrast, the percentage of Asian-Americans admitted to Harvard, and other Ivy League schools remains remarkably stable for the past 20 years at around 16 percent despite the increasing Asian American applicants (Washington Post). Apparently, AB 1726 is used as a backdoor way to overturn Proposition 209, which bans the affirmative action. Concerns have been rising among Chinese American communities that AB 1726 will be a threat to Chinese American’s struggle for social and economic equality. Also, AB 1726 is not the first act that attempts to reintroduce affirmative action in California. Senate Constitutional Amendment No.5(SCA 5) was proposed to eliminate Proposition 209’s ban on the use of race, sex, color and ethnicity in college admission in California admission system (California Legislative Information), but was withdrawn because of the fervent opposition from primarily Asian American communities. If SCA 5 is highway robbery, AB1726 is deception and inseparably linked to SCA 5. Instead of supporting overt racial discrimination, supporters who crave