anthropologiste

Just got a phone call from Duquesne! Accepted there.

Yay! Congrats! One of my mentors got his PhD there. It's a great program

Just got a phone call from Duquesne! Accepted there.

If love to meet the man who thinks he deserves the spots I get more than I do. That'd be funny. 
 
I mean, I get it. For the first time in their lives, being a man is a gender, and being white is a race, rather than being the center from which all things deviate. It must be scary. But I would expect more from future philosophers than bad arguments about reverse sexism or reverse racism. You all are fundamentally misunderstanding precisely why and how diversity is good for the academy. 
 
At any rate, I've often been the only woman in philosophy classes or in philosophy groups. I don't really mind it because I learned to be assertive and steadfast, but it was difficult to learn and painful when everything you're taught your whole life about what kind of person you should be runs counter to it. That's probably a big reason why so few women end up trying to pursue philosophy to begin with. In a way, just that weeds out a huge amount of people who feel they're incapable. And, generally, men are a lot more confident in their abilities, so I'd assume more would apply simply by virtue of believing in themselves more. 
 
And for @philosophe getting blamed for there not being enough women in philosophy. Lol. It takes a lot of confidence to throw out such a bullshit argument in a public philosophy forum... 

Ohmygosh. What happened here? Eep. I took a law and philosophy course last semester that talked about race discrimination in academia, and had to deal with a lot of people throwing around these types of arguments. If anecdotal evidence is fair game, as it appears that that is the trend, here's mine: 
I'm half mexican, and my dad is an immigrant. I grew up unable to communicate with about half of my family, and I lived in a trailer park for the first eight years of my life before moving to a small apartment in a town where I was the only Mexicanish Latinaish person--in sixth grade people asked if I brushed my hair because I was the only one who had curly hair. At fourteen I decided to get a job, and I coded websites for ten dollars an hour while eating only ramen so that I could attend private school. I financed this entirely myself. Parental supervision wasn't super big because my mom is a cosmetologist who owns a small business, so she wasn't really home when I was growing up. Then, in college, I have worked three jobs for the past several years while living in an apartment made for one person with my dad and uncle. Sophomore year the university screwed up my financial aid and froze my account, so I couldn't register for classes and I stopped eating in order to make payments. I dropped to 104 lbs (for reference, this was a decrease of about twenty pounds), and pulled several all nighters. Because I'm a first generation college student (my mom didn't complete high school) I dealt with all of this while hearing things from my mom like "If it *really* mattered to you, you would just have a 4.0." and "Please help your sister with scheduling, but make sure she takes useful classes, not the crap you're taking." (I'm paying for college, I take the classes I want.) Now, senior year, I'm probably going to be shut out of graduate school, I'm going to find a job and reapply. And I know that if I had the amount of time to focus on my studies that many of my peers get (and they seem to have a lot of time to go out and drink and party), I could actually have a 4.0 and a stellar writing sample and a perfect GRE score. (I actually did get a 4.0 last semester.) Instead, I balance three jobs, leadership positions in Women in Math, I volunteer with a group that helps get more students interested in mathematics, and I'm taking six classes. (So basically, I pull a couple all nighters per week and drink coffee two to four times a day.) 
And if I don't get into graduate school, my response isn't going to be to complain that the system seems to hate me. Instead, I'm going to work harder to be an applicant they want to accept.  

My bad. I didn't know that the point of these diversity questions was to move others with stories of my struggles. I'll try harder next time to make me seem more worthy of those fellowships. 

Ugh. They seriously need to change that. 
 
Both my parents are Colombian. My mom is darker than my dad, because my dad's family is white as hell. My dads dad's family is descended from conquistadors. My mom's dad was Afro Colombian. My mom's mom is Spanish and indigenous. Both my parents came here illegally in the 80s and eventually got citizenship. Spanish is my native language, and I didn't learn English until I was 5, but I was born in the US. I'm light skinned naturally but even a hint of sun makes me turn brown. But I'm not white, or African, or indigenous. It seems remarkably unfair to have to choose since we don't really categorize that way in South America. And on top of that, I don't even know how to answer the native language question. BS, I tell you! They need to find better questions to ask if they want to legitimately increase diversity. 

I should probably take this as an opportunity to talk about all my struggles and stuff... And about how BS it is to expect me to select a race when I'm Hispanic. It isn't easy. At all.