Culture can challenge foreign students

Source: College Media Network

If living at home, Bangladesh native Refayat Haque would not see unmarried men and women publicly holding hands.

It's forbidden. But in America and at GW, the taboos around sex dissimilate, Haque said, giving students from other countries new perspectives on sex and relationships.

"Sex is very taboo and sex before marriage is even worse. Almost everyone is Muslim and they aren't supposed to have premarital sex," Haque said of his home.

With scantily clad men and women on television and couples engaging in public displays of affection in plain sight, the sex culture at Western colleges and universities can challenge the beliefs of international students. In a study on Asian students adjusting to college life in the U.S., Dr. Jun-Chih Gisela of Texas A&M said a lack of familiarity with American customs and culture can sometimes cause international students to feel isolated.

"Many Asian international students feel uncomfortable with the individualism and competitiveness associated with the American culture, " Dr. Lin said in her study.

But for Haque and other international students interviewed, America's sexual culture was less of a shock because they attended international boarding schools before college.

Haque's experiences freshman year led him to the conclusion that certain values held by college students weren't for him.

"I realized what situations were good for me and what's not. My morals and ethics are still how they were at home," he said. "It wasn't hard to adjust, but [it was] a bit weird."

Very simple. If the 21-year skank is hot, than the situation is good, if she's not hot, than it's not.

iPhone to replace register at Japan university

Source: Reuters

A Japanese university is giving away Apple Inc's trendy iPhone to students for free, but with a catch: the device will be used to check their attendance.

The project, which is being tested ahead of its formal launch in June, involves 550 first and second year students and some staff of a department at Aoyama Gakuin University, which is located just outside Tokyo in Sagamihara city.

The school's iPhones are meant to create a mobile information network between students and professors, but they are also a convenient way for the teachers to take attendance in class.

As students enter the room, instead of writing their name on a sheet, they simply type in their ID number and a specific class number into an iPhone application.

To prevent students from logging in from home or outside class, the application uses GPS location data and checks which router the students have logged in to.

.....more

They take attendance in university? I thought at that point you are old enough to determine if you want to show up to class or not. You're paying for it. I figured the University would be cheering for students to fail so they could get more years and money out of them. That's what spring and summer semesters are for!

This is terrible. It's like having a dog tag on you. GPS tracking? I can see a professor checking up on a student cause he's absent and see him humping some chick in his dorm room.

South Korea Creating Ivy League Feeder High Schools

(notice the obsession over brand name and prestige, a very disturbing Asian trait)


Kim Hyun-kyung, who has accumulated nearly perfect scores on her SATs, is multitasking to prepare for physics, chemistry and history exams.

“I can’t let myself waste even a second,” said Ms. Kim, who dreams of attending Harvard, Yale or another brand-name American college. And she has a good shot. This spring, as in previous years, all but a few of the 133 graduates from Daewon Foreign Language High School who applied to selective American universities won admission.

It is a success rate that American parents may well envy, especially now, as many students are swallowing rejection from favorite universities at the close of an insanely selective college application season.

“Going to U.S. universities has become like a huge fad in Korean society, and the Ivy League names — Harvard, Yale, Princeton — have really struck a nerve,” said Victoria Kim, who attended Daewon and graduated from Harvard last June.

After reading that article, I suspect a lot of those kids are like some asian-canadian kids who grew up equally sheltered/protected, who end up going nuts/wild in college and also possibly don't resolve identity, self esteem, or white worship issues.

Huge Rise in Evangelical Asian Americans

Young, Asian American, and Christian

Berkeley's always been a strange place. I know many Asians either were forced to go there or avoid it like the plague. No surprise that they're still nuts.

-----

"Asian-American evangelical Christians have become commonplace at elite universities across the US. The trend started in the late '80s and early '90s, and increased as the presence of Asian Americans on campuses grew — specifically East Asians of Chinese and Korean descent. By the 2000s, it had become a phenomenon meriting research papers, books, and articles.

Although Asian Americans only make up about 4 percent of the US population, they constitute about 15 percent of the students at Ivy League colleges, and more than 40 percent at schools like UCLA, UC Irvine, and UC Berkeley, according to a 2007 article, "Asian Americans for Jesus: Changing the Face of Campus Evangelicalism" by Rebecca Kim, an assistant professor of sociology at Pepperdine University. And yet their numbers are disproportionately higher in campus fellowships, sometimes as much as 80 percent."