The topic of affirmative actions in schools is a touchy one for me.
On the one hand, because my sister is classified as Caucasian, she sees a lot of her Latino and African American friends get accepted into med school with MCAT scores and lower grades than her.
On the one hand, because my sister is classified as Caucasian, she sees a lot of her Latino and African American friends get accepted into med school with MCAT scores and lower grades than her.
On the other hand, I support inclusion, because let's be honest, there are a lot of benefits my family has enjoyed just for passing as Caucasian, and a few scholarships to kids who have worked their asses off are nothing compared to all the money we've wasted as a nation on needless wars and the trillion dollar F-35 fighter jet that doesn't even fly.
So when Guillermo Pomarillio got grilled by his dentist for getting accepted into Stanford with a lower ACT score than his daughter's, I felt for the kid.
Pomarillo wrote about his visit to the dentist in a Facebook post, and how "surprised" the man was that he got accepted into the prestigious school.
"Were you surprised because you had a Stanford student on your chair or because you had a minority, low-income student, that needed government help to get braces, and would be attending Stanford on your chair? I believe it was the latter." Pomarillio wrote.
The Dentist then tried saying that because Pomarillo came from Englewood, a notoriously low-income town in Chicago, that he received preferential treatment over his daughter to go to Stanford.
"You then said, ‘Well my daughter got a 35 and she didn't get into Stanford. She goes to University of Michigan.' In my head I thought, ‘Wow that's great, UMich is a good school.' But you didn't stop there, you kept going. You said, ‘Well when you have kids from neighborhoods like THESE, like you know, ENGLEWOOD. It's easy for them to get into Harvard or Stanford with a (states my score).' In my mind, I was confused. Did he really just say that? But you didn't stop. You kept going. You said, ‘You know, when kids go to schools around here. (AKA public schools in minority neighborhoods) It's easier for them to get into schools like Stanford. My daughter goes to a school where like 20 kids get perfect ACT scores.' I stayed quiet. He continued, ‘you're very lucky. Consider yourself very lucky. Getting into Stanford is like competing on The Voice, you know, when you get the buzzer.'"
"Wait what? So you're telling me that 18 years of rigorous hard work is like going on The Voice. You're telling me that pure luck got me admitted into not only Stanford, but schools like Princeton, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, and WASHU, and waitlisted at Tufts, Penn, and Columbia (I didn't tell him this btw)?! To say that I was admitted into a school simply because of my background is ridiculous. OF COURSE YOUR DAUGHTER WAS GOING TO SCORE HIGHER THAN ME. You're a dentist that can afford to send her to a school that will help her achieve a score like that. You're an educated dentist, with a college degree and dentistry degree. My parents, two undocumented immigrants that only obtained a grammar school education, couldn't afford to send me to private schools. Yes, I may have grown up in a neighborhood that doesn't have many young kids going to schools like Stanford. But it doesn't mean that people where I come from don't have the potential to succeed at Stanford. We deserve to go to places like Stanford."
It actually turned out that 69% of Hispanic high school graduates are going to college after graduating high school compared to 67% of white students.
And even though he scored lower on a standardized test (which are BS, by the way) he most likely went through more than his daughter and other students.
"But, she literally scored a few points higher than me. If those few points mean that she is better than me, then you are neglecting a lot. You are neglecting that I faced more struggles than your daughter. You are neglecting that all odds were against me. But you feel entitled to say that I got ‘lucky' and that ‘because of where I come from' I got into Stanford. Little do you know that at a young age I excelled in classrooms. My mother kept transferring me schools every time we moved to a new, cramped apartment. But I excelled."
Which just goes to show that whatever you accomplish there's going to be some salty-ass people trying to rain on your parade.
