English 2100: Identity and Representation

Diversity College Presentation

*charts were created using data from Dept. of Education and U.S. Census

Through the Creative Re-Mix, I was trying to demonstrate not only the difficulty in creating a diverse college campus but how representative or not representative that a college campus is relative to the United States population. At the beginning of my Remix, I asked the class to write one factor that they would consider in admitting students had they been on the admission board for a college. Everyone wrote different factors ranging from socio-economic status to gender. That activity alone demonstrated all the different ways that a small classroom of fewer than thirty students could believe was the best way to consider a student for admission. This disagreement truly does happen in the real world and is demonstrated by the differences in consideration between different colleges and universities. To show this in terms of numbers, I decided to specifically focus on race using different colleges as case studies. I compared the schools to the racial demographics of the greater United States population and made evident how simply one factor cannot prove whether or not a college is diverse. Diversity is a multitude of factors that combined create what we know today as diversity.

My research paper was about Diversity in College and what exactly that means and the best way to implement it. Therefore, my Digital Re-mix connects to it because of the general theme of diversity in universities. Through my research, I discovered that different universities use different admission reviews to create a diverse community while maintaining the academic integrity of the institution. For example, the University of California Berkeley uses a holistic review in which race is not considered as a factor for admissions. Consider this to the policy of the University of Texas Austin which uses a policy in which the top ten percent of every Texas high school is automatically accepted at UT Austin. Caltech, on the other hand, utilizes a race-blind admissions review. I compared these colleges in order to show how if race was the only factor that was to be considered for diversity then certain colleges would not be diverse at all. However, looking at a combination of factors, the conclusion may be a little different.

Through the process of creating these two assignments, I learned a lot about colleges and finding creative ways to present the information that I have learned. The creative project made me critically evaluate the best way to demonstrate the new information that I had learned as well as the conclusion I had made based on my findings.

When choosing my research topic for my research paper, I chose the one that appealed to me the most. That was immigration. As it is one of the most controversial topics on any news platform right now, it seemed fitting that I went deeper into this issue to find out what my standpoint on immigration was. Because of the frequent call-outs of “Fake News” and un-scholarly sources claiming the benefits/risks of Immigration, I decided to find out myself how America should take on immigration. After scouting out a few articles about this topic, I found that my standpoint stood out more on the benefits of Immigration. I used that to formulate what I should begin to write about; how America should take on the benefits of Immigration. I wrote this research paper with one thing on the back of my mind; how America was built by the backbones of undocumented/documented immigrants who came from beyond borders and overseas to make a living for themselves and their family. Even the first people that sailed across to colonize America were considered Immigrants. Unfortunately, we took the land from the indigenous and named ourselves “Americans” this is why when we ask “What makes us American?” it produces many answers based on our heritage and where we were raised.

For my digital remix, I wanted to do something entertaining and fun. So why not a mini-game? It wasn’t as fun as I thought it would be since I was doing this two days before the presentation, but I managed to pull through. I first did an immigrate-emigrate-migrate dictionary test to test the capabilities of ENG 2100. Then I moved on to an extra (Where is Hakil?) to make everyone laugh and to hide from the fact that I rushed this presentation. Next was a under-over game where people had to guess the population of cities that I only put pictures of. It was a pretty hard game since the photos were taken from a birds eye view and everything city looks the same from that view, so it was just to play around with the class. I could go on but we already saw my presentation, so what I really want to say is this digital remix brought upon the “fun” from a really boring research paper. It was a great way to end the class with a blast.

When I was coming up with an idea for my presentation I was trying to go for something that people can understand easily with limited amount of context. My research topic posed the question: How does the criminal justice system treat people of color unfairly? This was all I chose to deliver to my audience before presenting my digital remix. I chose to do a short video that displayed two perspectives. The one with color represented reality and the one in black and white represented a form of reality, but with a  twist. The actors I chose for this project were specific individuals; my cop had two different colored eyes to symbolize the two perspectives being witnessed, and people of color were chosen so that the audience can really notice was group is being targeted and addressed when it comes to telling their story.

The video related a lot to my research topic because it shows how the criminal justice system can view situations differently depending on who is involved. I chose to go with an exaggerated approach with three scenes to really showcase to what lengths and excuses the law would go to label such people of color as criminals. In my research paper, I discuss how people of color can be stopped long before any criminal activity is committed. I presented 3 harmless and innocent acts in my video and then twisted them to how the justice system can switch up the entirety of the story. A video was also my approach because this sort of media is what this generation listens to. Currently, not a lot of people read newspapers due to the wider use of technology and social media. To get such a topic noticed and understood, I found an outlet in which people can easily interpret the truth that we live in a society that still uses racism as a foundation for the majority of its decisions.

By doing this sort of creative remix, I learned that a lot of people are interested in what a video like this has to say. The primary question I would get asked by my actors is “will you be posting this somewhere?”. I would reply no, but I am now considering to do so because they believe something like this needs to be shown. The actors I recruited found the concept behind the video so intriguing that some were able to relate to what was being shown. Overall, both the research paper and creative digital remix have shown me how knowledge on a topic can lead to further research or possible projects down the line that relate to the information I learned. I used what I learned to educate others in a subtle way and it has shown me that if I want to talk about something as a sensitive as such a topic, I would need to know the facts first.

For both my research paper and digital remix, I was trying to explain the role of school in teen suicide prevention. In view of the problem of teen suicide, I think it is necessary to explore and find an effective solution. In my digital remix project, I created a video. I first drew ten stick figures: a student with suicide ideation, a well-trained educator, a professional, a door with the word “mental health service” on it, a scene of school bullying, a scene of teacher bullying, a crisis management team, a scene showing academic competition, a scene of teaching the students how to handle and manage different pressure, and a student that is healthy. Then I matched them with ten main points when I was recording for my video. I first started with talking about the significance of teen suicide prevention. I then talked valid screenings of potential suicidal targets by placing in-service training for teachers, professionals, and mental health service in schools. After that, I talked about factors that contribute to teen suicide, such as academic stress and school bullying, and effective prevention programs regarding the factors. In both my research paper and digital remix, I want to emphasize the relationship between teen suicide and school. The imperfect education system in schools is one of the reasons why teenagers’ suicide cannot be effectively controlled. Schools ignore the importance and necessity of education in mental health. For a long time, most schools only care about students’ studies and ignore psychological development, which to some extent leads to the failure to timely solve the psychological problems of young people that could have been eliminated in the bud, and the failure to timely detect some signs of suicide, resulting in tragedies. From my research paper and digital remix project, I learned about the positive correlation between suicide and school bullying, and between suicide and academic stress. Through research, I found that academic failure and stress has been found to be associated with depression while depression is often connected with suicidal ideation. Schools and educators should take the responsibilities to help balance the academic stress. Bullying does not necessarily lead directly to suicide, but bullying can have negative consequences such as depression and anxiety. Bullying and bullying victims have a higher risk of suicide than other groups. Therefore, schools play a vital role in preventing bullying, intervening in bullying in order to prevent suicide among teenagers.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=152GVpkrLxIRD4Qk7D3XUCqOoTEoLa4Xs

Unfortunately, I was not able to attach my video to this post…

The gender wage gap has been a prominent issue in the U.S for quite some time. However, there is a fairly large misconception of the gender wage gap seen in the United States and other industrialized nations. The wage gap may be 80 cents on the dollar for women’s earnings compared to men’s earnings, but that doesn’t account for individual jobs. It is an average number, so this statistic can’t be applied for individual salaries. In this presentation, I aimed to highlight what the wage gap actually was, what some of the factors were, and what we could do as a society to fix it. The government could definitely enact laws that would enforce a publication of companies’ individual wage gaps to be released yearly. Alongside the proposal of solutions to the problem, I proposed that society should take a deeper look into what else causes the wage gap. Sex discrimination seems to be a large chunk of the wage gap, and it is wrong. Men often get paid more than women for completing the same tasks. It is 100% illegal. Companies get away with it by not enforming their female employees of everyone else’s salaries. By recording two acting skits and presenting a humorous video to the class, I was able to display how companies discriminate against women in the labor force, what women can do to retaliate, and what the government can do to lower the rates of discrimination seen in the working class. One issue I encountered in creating my presentation was trying to find the perfect blend of attention-grabbing humor and well-knitted facts. Research clearly shows that women are consistently mistreated in the world; we have seen it through the #metoo movement and other projects my classmates worked very hard on. I molded some of my research from the paper into the essay, and the presentation received positive feedback. All in all, I learned quite a bit from doing my research and presenting this creative remix. I learned that people from all different political, ethnic, and moral backgrounds share a common idea in the gender wage gap; it isn’t fair for people to be paid differently for completing the same tasks. Work experience and prior salary history should not be accounted for in the calculation of your salary, and neither should your gender. I also learned that the U.S has made massive improvements in the closing the discriminatory section of the wage gap, but I don’t personally believe it has been enough. We can do so much better as the country that stands for equality and freedom.

https://baruchmailcuny-my.sharepoint.com/:v:/g/personal/andrew_hahn_baruchmail_cuny_edu/EaQ5Hfwji0JMoPZT7ajiZZYBTLeLvMboAKrJ0vUHO-nBSw?e=NLph1Y

In my video I was trying to explain what the diversity crisis in specialized high schools look like. I made two pie charts to help my fellow peers visualize the lack of diversity in these elite schools. In the pie chart that represented NYC public high schools as a whole, most of the students were Black and Hispanic. On the other hand, the pie chart that represented The Bronx High School of Science revealed that Blacks and Hispanic make up less than 10%. Furthermore, Asians and Whites dominated in Bronx Science.

I also explained Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to fix this problem. He proposed to remove the SHSAT, a test that students are required to take to get accepted into a specialized high school. Mayor de Blasio also proposed to have the Discovery program, a program that lets students who scored just below the cutoff score on the SHSAT obtain a seat in a specialized high school, target Blacks and Hispanics. Mayor de Blasio’s reasoning behind these proposals is that the SHSAT is racist and favors Whites and Asian over Blacks and Hispanics. However it’s these proposals that are racist as they clearly favor Blacks and Hispanics. This video is related to my analytical paper because both are related to the SHSAT and specialized high schools. My paper also talked about the diversity crisis and Mayor de Blasio’s proposals to fix this issue. I also included other possibilities as to why the diversity issue exists in specialized high schools.

Through both assignments I learned that regular high schools and specialized high schools in New York City are basically segregated. Blacks and Latinos are underrepresented in specialized high schools and the gap is pretty huge. In addition, I learned that more Asian families than White families are protesting against the removal of the SHSAT. This is probably due to the fact that the gap between Asian representation in regular schools and specialized schools is the biggest. Thus more Asians will be affected than Whites when the SHSAT is officially removed. This proposal is racist and offensive to Asians. In fact, the SHSAT is what gave Asian minorities, like me, a chance to get better education. When the high school application results came out, no other schools besides the specialized high schools accepted me. Despite the fact that I had a 93 GPA in both 7th and 8th grade, regular high schools couldn’t offer me a seat because of my medically excused absences. It was because of the SHSAT that I was able to receive a good quality education.

My research topic was about the Tibetan culture in exile and how the Tibetan people assimilate other cultures with theirs. I had to brainstorm a lot of ideas to come up with a creative way to portray the topic to the class and ended up showing the class how to make one of the famous Tibetan dish called momo. I felt that doing a project which was on hand and fun would really engage my classmates and make them maybe more interested in what i was trying to say with this project. I wanted to sort of inform my classmates a little about my culture and people since Tibet is not well known to people because it really doesn’t have its own country. Momo was a great way to introduce my research topic because it is one of the most famous dish for Tibetan people. The fact that the most famous dish of Tibetan people is literally the same as what the Chinese call dumpling, which is ironic since tibetans don’t like being called Chinese. However, the point is that it has been tibetan culture to take in other culture as they relocate to different parts of the world. Momo is just another dish created by the Tibetans from the influence of Chinese cuisine. Momo also plays another role which is create a sense of community for the Tibetan people in NYC. Every year in Jackson Heights have a event known as momo crawl which allow all the Tibetan restaurants to show who has the best momo and this brings many tibetans together to socialize with each other and feel the Tibetan community which is rare in America. This project has also made me more aware of my culture and introduced me to new things that I thought wasn’t important. One was that in my family we make momo’s only when the whole family is at home so we can make it together, I always thought it was a waste of time. However, after this project I realized its more of a way to see what each of us are up to and how we are doing in our lives and a way to connect with each other because in todays society teenagers barely have time for their parents. Also the Momo Crawl event always stood out to me as another way for people to make money and thought it was useless, but now I see that its a way for Tibetans to show their culture to the world while having a good time amongst Tibetans and non-tibetans as well and bring them together.  

In my creative re-mix, I did a jeopardy game, and a power point that consisted of photos and videos in order to represent my topic about video games. I was trying to make my creative re-mix funny and entertaining because my topic on video games are both fun and interesting. I decided to make a jeopardy game in order to show make the topic more interactive with the class. The jeopardy game I made consisted of games that are extremely good and well known. I expected everyone to know at least 2 of the video games I put up. The jeopardy game was meant to show how video games are widely popular amongst people. I also did a photo essay in order to show the information in my research paper in a more fun and interesting way. For the positive effects of video games, I used photos that showed people that were relaxed and having fun with friends. I also used photos of kids playing video games in school in order to show the potential video games have on education. For the negative effects, I used photos and memes that showed the aggressive behavior and the decrease in empathy that video games cause. I also used a video that shows the violent and out of control nature that video games can cause. Then I had introduced that kids these days are completely obsessed with video games and I had asked a question that says, “What do you think are some possible solutions to these problems”? I realized that my classmates’ solutions were like mine because the solutions we came up with was to limit the time we play video games. In order to conclude my presentation, I showed a funny video that showed a parent drowning his son’s video game console in a swimming pool. I did this because I wanted to concluded my presentation with a funny video and to show the consequences of not listening to our parents. My creative re-mix connects to my research paper because I had introduced the positive and negative effects of video games ,and had offered some solutions that I wrote in my paper.

The process of creating both of these projects went particularly well for me. The most difficult part was finding new evidence that supported the positive and negative effects. There was a-lot of evidence that backed up one aspect, but not the others. As a result, I had to look at each of the sources more carefully, in order to determine what sources were more reliable. Both of these experiences has helped me grow because I was able to gain more knowledge about a topic that interests me and got the opportunity to be creative.

When the professor informed the class about the creative re-mix, I instantly had something in mind. I had written my entire paper focusing on the Academic aspect of the aftermath of the immigration policies, now I wanted to go beyond the horizons of the paper and focus on the general aftermath of the policies as a whole. This is something that I feel personally about and thus I knew that if I worked on it, I would be able to put in my hundred percent. The goal of my re-mix shifted from analyzing the effects of the immigration policies on education to inviting sympathy and changing the perspectives of my classmates pertaining to immigrants. Moreover, over the course of creating the re-mix, I decided to focus on the positive aspects of immigration in the country to bolster my argument and used some statistics which would help support my claims.

As my research paper mainly focuses on how immigration policies affect education in the United States, particularly students, I wanted to showcase the other side of immigration using a video and how it isn’t such a negative thing after all as I did not want to repeat the content of the essay in my Digital Re-mix. It was crucial for me to portray the effects of those policies on children (students) who could grow up to be beneficial for the society and contribute to it, just like Marisela, whose example I shared along with my digital Re-mix. Thus I decided to use my digital re-mix to explore how immigration and immigrants affect our society and policies while my essay explored how the policies affect immigrants.

Although I already felt passionate about the subject of my essay and my digital Re-mix, researching for the essay and the video helped me understand the plight of people who are affected by the immigration policies and made me more sympathetic and empathetic towards them. Moreover, I learned more and more about cases of family separations due to the policies which drove me to focus the content of my video on why it is pivotal to keep those families together, not only for the benefit of the family but also for the benefit of the country as a whole. The entire process of creating the video and writing the essay was a learning process for me as I gained more knowledge than I already had about the topic and got the opportunity to explore my creativity for the same.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdN321qAzWRcn32IzMxsFPcZmhNYOdO-h9gA8ShVIdUn4awKw/viewform?usp=sf_link

My research paper focuses on how bilingualism affect the intellectual development of children. It is believed that the effects of bilingualism are everlasting and have a long-term effect on our brain. However, I did not believe bilingualism could enhance our brain other than the benefits to talk in different languages. Therefore, for my digital remix, my goal is to find out whether being bilingual influences students by looking into their SAT scores and overview on their memory and problem-solving skills.  

Before I created this project, I was going to draw a comic strip to compare the bilingual students with monolingual students in school. However, I realized a survey could better represent both bilingual and monolingual students in college. For my survey, I made a Google form consisting of 13 questions and 2 short response questions which would help me collect a series of data from the participants. In my digital remix, I tried to be consistent with the research findings discovered by renowned researchers and psychologists. However, my data on the percentage of bilingual speakers was inconsistent with the national data. I concluded that this might due to some statistic biases. One of the bias that heavily skewed the result would be underrepresented/ undercoverage bias. The rest of my data supported the research findings which I mentioned in my research paper. One of the many findings was bilingual speakers had cognitive advantages over monolingual speakers. The data I collected from my survey shows that bilingual speakers had better problem-solving skills and memory. With these advantages, they would have a higher SAT score according to studies. The question I asked in my survey required the participants to provide their scores. Based to the responses, bilinguals scored on the higher end (1310-1400). The result was correlative to the research finding that cognitive skills enhanced their scores. 

Throughout the two projects, I learned many things in the process of writing and creating the projects. While many people think being bilinguals do not boost our cognitive skills (I was guilty of this), but we built more skills than just language. However, in order to be benefited by cognitive skills, bilingual speakers have to be fluent in both languages because mentally translating and switching from one language to another language exercise our brain. Just like our muscles, exercising our brain improves the overall functionality of the brain. Overall, the projects debunked some of the misconceptions on bilingualism and informed me about the advantages of bilingualism.