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Comment by gautamcgoel | Hacker News Reader

I am Indian-American, and while I cannot comment much about the culture of Indians in India, I can comment a bit about the culture of Indian-Americans, especially second-gen Indian Americans like myself. Many of my Indian-American classmates exhibit the behaviors described in this article. For example, in my high school (a magnet program for gifted students), there were several Indian-American students, many of whom were "high-achieving". Most of them put a lot of effort into trying to buff their resumes to get into good colleges, for example by volunteering on causes they didn't really care about. Cheating was rampant; the attitude many students seemed to have was why actually learn stuff when you can just cheat and get the same career rewards? Almost all of them followed very conventional (read: boring) career paths; in fact most of them became doctors. True creativity and risk-taking was not a personality trait I commonly observed, I'm sorry to say. I was lucky to have very "Americanized" parents who didn't raise me with these backward attitudes.

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Please. Being a doctor is boring? It is challenging to be a doctor, and it is almost impossible to cheat through the USMLE (US Medical Licensing Exam) process. It is a 3 step process, which includes four tough exams taken at registered centers, which are actively monitored. I'm saying this as a spouse of a physician who has gone through the journey, and the amount of work they put in through their med school, USMLE, and then residency is unfathomable. Seeing someone put 14 hours of work every day to achieve their goal is not boring, rather a representation of their desire to drive, achieve, and excel. Also, with so many Indian doctors, it says a lot about their grit and hard work.

From the outside it does seem boring; a lot of rote learning and not a lot of flexibility once you're out, high risk of getting sick and or sued. 99.99% or more Doctors are not House.

To be a doctor is as hands-on as you can be unless you speak of radiology, but that too is fascinating. You spend four years of your life doing hands-on work during the residency (rote learning?). There is an infinite amount of learning in medicine! Even after so many years of research, we do not understand the human body completely. I don't know what is you mean by boring; as a layperson, everything will seem boring unless you put in the effort to learn more about a field. But still, liver transplant, heart transplant, lung transplant, surgeries, anesthesia, diagnosing unknown diseases are not interesting? (flexibility? there are so many fields) I suggest you visit a Level 1 Trauma center close to your home and see what goes on in there. Reality is more brutal than TV in this case.

It may be boring to you, and that is ok, but it does not negate the fact that it is a challenging field and demands immense hard work to be one.

Three things: first, I never said it was easy, only that it was fairly conventional. Second, I never said that anyone cheated on the USMLE (I agree that would be quite hard). Third, some of these comments suggest that somehow I have no idea what it takes to be a doctor. As a matter of fact, my mother is a pediatrician and a professor at one of the top 10-15 medical schools in the US, so I have a pretty good idea what it takes. I acknowledge that it is an important and demanding job; nevertheless, I think it is a fairly conventional and unimaginative path to take in life, compared to, say becoming an artist or doing a startup.

>nevertheless, I think it is a fairly conventional and unimaginative path to take in life, compared to, say becoming an artist or doing a startup.

This is exactly privilege speaking. Starving Artists/Musicians/Humanities/Literature major are practically a meme and have become a cautionary tale on what to avoid until you have established yourself financially. Whether it is fair or not, life does not reward them in today's economic system (ignore outliers). Hence the need for "safe and boring" jobs like Doctor/Engineer/Lawyer/anything else that helps you earn money to lead a "boring" life.

>This is exactly privilege speaking.

I'm not disagreeing with you here, but how is that even relevant in this discussion? This was about the path students from a high-level school took.

Yes, and those students come from a life of lesser privilege.

> I was lucky to have very "Americanized" parents who didn't raise me with these backward attitudes.

I'm white British and would rather call them different attitudes.

(I'll also be the first to joke about 'PC gone mad 'differently abled'' etc. - that's not my point here - it's not out of an abundance of caution or respect for all, I just think, honestly, yeah, why not push your children into something they don't enjoy but is high-paying, professional, and comfortable? There are reasons 'why not', of course, but also 'why'; so it's a different attitude, not 'backward', unless you only mean to say 'out of favour'.)

>> I was lucky to have very "Americanized" parents who didn't raise me with these backward attitudes.

You miss the entire point of the article. You are privileged not only to have Americanized parents, but you are privileged because you are an American. Your world is way better than that of a common Indian student. Most Indian students need a job, just to be able to feed their families. Quoting from the article:

"When push comes to shove (which is the permanent state for most Indians), we only care about one thing, survival."

When it's about survival, everything else goes out the window. That's one of the points the article is trying to highlight.

Thank You!, Thank YOU!, THANK YOU!

This right here is the truth. The article is simply a rant from somebody who has yet to grow up and understand the real world i.e. they are in a privileged position in life. When you have so much competition for limited opportunities, you cannot apply the same yardstick from a different environment. The Fight for Survival is as true of social structures as it is in biological ones. It seems this Indian American has no idea of the sacrifices his parents made in establishing themselves in America and providing him the privileged position from which he pontificates.

I don’t understand why you seem to imply that half arsing your education is fine if it means you get a job? Why not make the best of it and get a job?

Any Indian with access to a computer can potentially be a (much) better hire than the one from the most desired engineering college. In fact, I’d almost have to expect so since they don’t have to waste time on all that signalling.

It’s unfortunate that that apparently doesn’t matter to the companies doing the hiring :/

>> I don’t understand why you seem to imply that half arsing your education is fine if it means you get a job? Why not make the best of it and get a job?

Quoting from the article:

"In middle school children have dreams to become a Pilot in the airforce, or maybe a Police officer, or maybe a Opera Singer ! But by the time of high school, everyone is just either on road to become an Engineer, a Doctor, a Lawyer, a Chartered Accountant …. or a failure. This may seem harsh but that’s how most of the society operates here in India."

The problem here is that students are forced by their parents into a field of education they don't even like. How do you expect someone to understand the intricacies of fluid dynamics when they don't give a rat's ass about it. When you give exams on topics you are not even remotely interested in? Therein lies the privilege of being American. When you're a common Indian student, you don't have a choice in choosing your field of study

>> Any Indian with access to a computer can potentially be a (much) better hire than the one from the most desired engineering college.

This only works well for computer science. What about students who want to become doctors? Do you know that to get a seat in an Indian medical college, a common Indian student will most likely have to pay a "donation" just to get their foot in the door.

> How do you expect someone to understand the intricacies of fluid dynamics when they don't give a rat's ass about it.

The same way I studied everything in high school? I certainly didn’t give a fuck arout the molecular mass of hydrogen, but since I was going to be there anyway, I might as well spend my time there actually learning instead of sleeping.

It’s unfortunate if that situation continues into university, but hardly the end of the world.

>> It’s unfortunate if that situation continues into university, but hardly the end of the world.

And then from university, goes on to become your career. On, which you spend 1/3 of your day for 40 years.

I recognize that these "backwards" attitudes I described may make sense in India, since as you say, the culture and society is very different there. I consider these attitudes to be backwards in the US.

I'm from a poor background and I didn't cheat. Nor did I commit bogus pull requests just to pad my resume. These things poison any community trust, put people into positions that jeopardize other peoples lives, and make meritocracy a joke.

What does is say about a person if their attitude is that these things are okay if you are from a certain background? It says that they care about the background of the person more (for whatever reason, good or bad) than the damage it does to the communities that they interact with. Consider the consequences of this.

To give you a hypothetical example, in India, there are maybe 10k jobs but a million aspirants for that job. And 90% of those million people are poor. In USA, you have social security to fall back on if you don't get a job. In India, if you don't get that job, you're on your own until the next attempt. Being poor in USA and being poor in India are very different.

I am in no way encouraging hacky ways for resume grooming. I am just stating why it is a phenomena in India. You're doing a good job by not employing these tactics to further yourself. Also, a key difference could be that you're maybe not from India. And if you are, you're an exception not the norm.

His comment was about Indian Americans, who are on average much much better off than the average American, so really there isn't much need to bring third world resource scarcity mentality into raising your children here, but alas, you can take the immigrant from the country of origin but you can't take the country of origin from the immigrant.

I am sure you didn't intend for it to be this way but your comment is very arrogant. It seems you are coming from privilege and haven't really interacted with the real world yet. Perhaps you are still in college/ have only had high paying jobs like software engineering. Most people are not looking for high-risk jobs, they want a stable source of income that can enable them to provide a stable living for their family. This is especially true for people in countries like India. There is nothing boring or backwards about that. Especially not to someone who is not privileged.

And please do elaborate on why/how a career in medicine boring?

Why are you so quick to blame "backwards attitudes" when this behaviour is simply to meant to compensate for discrimination against Asians in college admissions? (https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-many-sins-...)

Asians with far better scores are deemed to be less worthy due to "uninteresting personalities" than others far less qualified.

I don't think it's difficult to understand why the children of people motivated enough to emigrate for better opportunities would themselves be ambitious and would want to establish themselves with stable, high performing careers (having almost no generational wealth to fall back on.)

I think it's backwards to believe that the measure of your life is how prestigious a college you went to, or how much money you make, especially if these goals lead you to cheat and lie to advance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W--KU79Y0DQ

> measure of your life is how prestigious a college you went to

In my experience, the prestige of a college definitely correlates with how rewarding your time at college is going to be.

You had a shitty circle of friends and are now projecting. I know many Indian-Americans who are hard working, creative and NEVER cheated. One doesn't need "Americanized" parents to be a decent person.

So the solution to being rejected due to high grades and uninteresting personality is to study more, cheat for higher grades and spend less time developing an interesting, genuine personality?

Also, if scores were the only reason to enroll a student, people from poor background, especially black and Latinos would basically never get in.

I dunno, I have no generational wealth to fall back on, but that has never really motivated my interest in a high performing career.

Of course, the career I chose just happened to be programming, so it did end up that way.

What's weird is how many students work their asses off, get amazing grades, go to top schools...and end up at a big tech company working with people who went to state school and community college. Of course going to a top school makes the application process easier, but only insofar that you clear the resume screen and get some confirmation/credential bias in your favor. Don't get me wrong, it's great that tech companies can have Stanford alongside community college. But honestly it seems a bit of a waste when my classmates who went to Stanford and Harvard end up at Facebook or Google. Truly the best minds of my generation devoted to getting people to click on ads.

If thats what they choose to work on, they probably weren't the best minds ;)

How could anyone know? Google is vast and has many kinds of jobs, and so there simply isn't enough information to say.

There is cutting-edge research and also pretty boring business app development. Also, some jobs are pretty specialized and not the sort of thing you can get as a generic software engineer.

I might have agreed had the comment been made by an Indian-American comedian, actor, author, journalist, ... someone in liberal arts, from someone with a truly unconventional career path.

A PhD from Caltech in machine learning and optimization doesn't sound very different from being a doctor if we're speaking of conventional (read: boring) career paths

Well he has Americanized superior parents with ultimate forward looking attitude.

So he chose the highly unconventional path of PhD in STEM. After finishing it he would chose uncustomary and also forward looking job at FAANG.

While the Untermenschen from his school mates of indian origin chose to become doctors or did not persue the much forward looking career in TE.

Does cheating work or are there a bunch of horrible doctors out there?

How did they not get filtered out during residency?

To answer your first two questions: yes and yes.

I'm talking about cheating in high school. It worked in terms of college admissions (presumably these students cheated in college to get into med school, but I can't speak to that with certainty).

This is an American high school, right? I don’t think I’ve seen anyone blatantly cheat their way through it (though I’m well aware of “volunteering” and “science projects”); where did you attend?

I tutored math in university, had many freshmen who straight up couldn't plug a number into a function and evaluate. They cheated the whole way through and nobody did anything to stop them. I'm sorry to say this, but US high school is a real joke in a lot of places.

Relevant WHO report: https://www.who.int/hrh/resources/16058health_workforce_Indi...

But I am not sure about the accuracy. There are other reports with similar or lower numbers.

Wildly different experience depending on the state and part (South is good in comparison to North).

There is a shortage of doctors despite everyone aiming for a medical degree. It is worse in rural areas so there are less qualified people treating others. Pseudoscience and pseudomedicine is a big industry too. Actors, news channels, babas, politicians, etc all encourage it.

The most recent example of above is baba ram dev's covid cure: https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2020/aug/05/covid-19...

He promoted his pseudoscience on multiple news channels as a cure for covid. Ayush ministry (which is a branch of government to regulate/approve pseudomedicine) stopped him on some advertising basis so he rebranded the thing to covid immunity booster.

Highly anecdotal, but my ex at the time (white), bio major, had a real tough time studying for midterms and finals in undergrad. Meanwhile, my cousin (Indian) in the same class was breezing through the exams, partying more than me (a liberal arts major!), generally screwing around and somehow consistently ended up with a better score. My ex couldn’t parse this and just assumed my cousin was smarter or more qualified academically. An understatement to say that she second-guessed if she was qualified to be in medicine.

Years later, my cousin laughingly confided in me that he had access to all the old exams that were just questions shuffled around through the years. He got them through his campus Indian student group. I confirmed this with some other people I knew in that group, all of who treated it like common knowledge. Changed the way I saw and interacted with people I’ve known my whole life. Certainly changed the way my ex felt about those haunting exam scores.

My personal take? Residencies have n spots. The people qualified to succeed in those spots is n * y (where y > 2). It may be that people who cheat to get into a residency were qualified to do the job, but it doesn’t mean they deserved to be there. This can be true in a lot of other positions that require the applicant to jump through different hoops.

> He got them [old exams] through his campus Indian student group.

Only shared with fellow Indians?

Yep, it was the official Indian student group registered on campus. Nothing wrong with the association itself, but a large subset of it were Bio majors so I’d imagine that’s how many were involved.

Why is studying based on previous years questions cheating. Dont we do the same with white board interviews?

It's not "cheating", per se, but it is unfair.

How does an unaffiliated student get access to those prior year exams? Fortunately, the internet is levelling this somewhat.

When teaching at a college level, I used to go out of my way to provide any historical resources. I want my class to be fair to everyone involved.

I also used to redraft my exams and assignments every single year. This is quite a lot of work and a lot of professors simply won't do it. However, if you don't, then some students will take advantage of it, and your class isn't being fair to everyone.

If the instructor says you can't do it then it is cheating.

It's common for professors to not allow students to keep exams for this reason. Students in such classes do a "brain dump" by writing down all the questions they remember immediately after leaving the test to get around this.

Some professors try to go after students who sell their notes for the class.

Since you bring it up, I think studying questions that a company has been known to ask in the past is somewhat in poor taste, especially if the candidate gives the impression that this is the first time they've seen the question. Usually, when I've done interviews, I'll try to throw a wrench into the question and see how the candidate reacts if I suspect they've seen the question before.

Though in both cases, I think it's on the question asker (either teacher or interviewer) to make sure that questions change up frequently enough and aren't easy to study without having genuine understanding.

When interview questions are generally of the ‘have I seen this question before’ kind, it’s hardly cheating to try and memorize as many of them as possible.

It just means the method of interviewing is flawed.

Just FYI, this is far more prevalent than is implied in this thread and not tied to a particular nationality/subgroup of people on college campuses. Established clubs, fraternities, sororities, arts/performing groups, and even niche majors/honors programs all tend to accumulate "academic resources" (i.e. past exams + homework) as members take courses over the years.

Isn’t that normal? I thought studying past exams is how it works, but the questions improve so you still have to understand the topics.

I remember when I was in college, we had this end of semester exam for stochastic processes. Our exams are usually about 2 hours long and have about 4-5 problems to solve. After this particular exam, a friend of mine was surprised that I hadn't seen the last problem with the answer in our professor's book (she has seen it the night before. Looks like all her friends had too). Ina mathematics exam with 4 problems, I can't exaggerate the relief one would feel if one of the problems is already solved for you. Not sure how often this happens, but it seems like it's quite common. I was in a special scholar's group. I was more into going to the library, exploring related theorems and stuff while except for a handful of others, most my peers were just doing past papers and practice questions for the exam. I did okay, but I felt like trying to learn more and explore things in university was a liability as far as exams concerned. I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Felt like a waste of time.

Ultimately it probably was. What use are your exam scores now?

You are right. It mattered when I was applying for jobs as a fresh grad. But it no longer matters. On the other hand, I still remember lots of the ideas behind theorems though I haven't done any pure math in a long time. While most of the people I know can't remember what a vector space is anymore despite high grades. Universities need to cut down the number of exams and let kids have sometime to think and try things out. When you have competitive quizzes every two weeks whole life revolves around them. Professors used tell us that those frequent quizzes were there to help us spread the eggs in multiple baskets so that our grades didnt depend on just one exam. I think they missed the point that I wasn't there for their exam grades in the first place. Well.

Wait. So your ex _didn't_ study the old exam papers? That is like the first step in any preparation.

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles."

She didn’t have access to them because they weren’t made available by the professor, but instead, by past students.

You just stereotyped a country + immigrants to the tune of billions. I'm sick of minorities being judged as a group and "Americans" being treated as individuals.

Do you really think 90% of Americans doing CS are not doing because of an easy FAANG job ? That they had some deep passion for CS since long ?

I'm also an Indian from one of the "top" engineering colleges and what you say is very much true for what I have seen first hand during the 4 year degree course.

Unfortunately the reason here is definitely cultural. I was lucky that my parents didn't force me to become an engineer or doctor (though it was by choice) but for majority of my friends since 9th std, it was about getting into IIT and their whole life and their whole parent's world revolve around getting a good job in a top MNC and that's the Indian version of American dream.

Unfortunately the competition is fierce and there are 10 candidates for every spot, so you buff, cheat, cut corners and do everything in your power to get ahead. Because if you don't the other person still will and he will take your spot (it's like SEO).

There is an amazing web series called Kota factory. If you want to understand the culture it offers some great insights into it in a very entertaining way!

Yes, this culture is exactly what I was talking about.

None of me or my friends cheated. You have a shitty circle of friends.

This is reality... so why is this being downvoted? Too much clashes with the morals of the privileged audience here who mostly grew up in an environment where no cutting corners was needed?

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