This week started off as me still not really knowing what my topic is about. I wrote my first draft as generally as I could, kind of just to get it written. Maybe this isn’t the best approach, but if I don’t know what I’m going to write about then it’s better than nothing. My motives aren’t to just sneak by, to get something down on paper to turn in. I am genuinely interested in the topic and writing the paper. I haven’t really stressed about it much since it’s not like I haven’t been trying. I think about the fact that I need a topic idea often but I don’t really know how to find a topic idea. Usually when I’m doing a project, it’s a software project, finding some sort of large program to make. I can think of many ideas for something like that, it’s what I know. This on the other hand, it’s hard for me to find a starting point.
This week I did decide to explore the topic idea of Asian Americans and computer science. I read a few articles and papers about some of the cultural stereotypes in computer science. The writer starts off telling a very believable story, about his upbringing, both of his parents being engineers. How they got him started in programming, giving him books from their graduate years for him to read about operating systems and compilers. The story was, well very believable because he told it from the perspective of someone who actually knows computer science. So after he told this story he breaks us the news that the whole story was a lie, but I could still tell that he was very knowledgable about computer science just by the way he told the story, the details involved. The paper goes on to talk about how he did eventually go to MIT and major in computer science and how he experienced no micro-inequities, because of the way he looked. He was part of the major demographic for computer science, white or Asian males. This paper was actually a really interesting perspective, because normally you hear from the person who experienced the micro-inequities, the person who isn’t part of the major demographic. Instead of facing implicit bias or stereotype threat, he had the privilege of implicit endorsement (Philip Guo, Silent Technical Privilege, slate.com). Basically because he looked the part, people assumed he knew what he was doing, he was able to fake it until he made it. The paper later goes on to talk about some experiences of other people, who were not part of the
major demographic of computer science.