Today, I was in a study room with my friend. We were both reading something for our classes, when she asked a question out of nowhere, “Do you have any idea how many Asians are there in Baruch?”
Since the question was SO random, I thought she wanted to answer the question herself, so I said, “No, do you?”
Surprisingly, she didn’t know either. This question, however, got stuck in our heads (you know, like when you are thinking about lyrics, and you just can’t remember the next line—yea, that kind of stuck), and eventually “cost” us the rest of our study time. We started by recalling the people we encounter daily to get a sense of the percentage of each ethnicity in our school, and we ended up realizing just how many of them are Asians!
Credited to http://web.ysu.edu/gen/ysu_generated_bin/images/image_slideshow//hands.jpg
My friend there, still struggling to do her homework while caught up in this conversation, said while looking down at her paper, “Just from what I remembered, I think at least 60% of the school are Asians. You know, including South and East Asians, and out of that, maybe about 40% of them speak some kind of Chinese? The other half, well… Half of them can understand it anyway. I don’t even know, but I think there might be more. So yea, the school is flooded with Asians.”
I, on the other hand, had completely given up my homework, spinning around in my chair, and said, “Well, just think about the hallway in the Vertical Building. There was one time, when I was done with my anthropology class, that the hallway was full of students. As I struggled to get to the escalator as soon as possible, before I realized it, people “split” into two groups: on my left side are the ones who spoke Chinese (different kinds of Chinese); and on my right side are the ones who spoke English. Just think about the number of Chinese speaking Chinese the school has to make that happen!”
To say it was a conversation, it was more like a “Sentence Popcorn”. A two-sentence conversation doesn’t count for anything, but the information we got was fascinating. My words exactly—just think about how many Asians there are in Baruch!
It turns out that about 35% of the Baruch population in Asian which is interesting. That is a fairly large percentage and I wonder why that is the percentage. Is it a complete coincidence or is there something that is particularly appealing about Baruch to the Asian population. It would be interesting to know. I liked this post because it raises a few questions and it does make you think.