Finally done with internship interviews.
The whole interview process was both traumatizing and a great learning experience. During the midst of it, a brother told me that it's a great experience, because you realize that even though you get rejected by 10+ companies, you are still okay. However, it took me a few times for me to get over the grief of getting so many rejections, because I was reluctant to admit even to myself that I was not okay. That I was disappointed. Because I'm always calm and okay. and chill. And that's been my identity, my thing. My mom had to call me out on my disappointment a couple times. Each time it took a couple days to get over a new layer of disappointment and grief. And it's normal to be disappointed since we spent months networking and preparing for interviews.
Anyway, everything was pretty much over a week or two ago. I just visited Cummins yesterday. I was excited for the visit. First time in Indianapolis. The people are truly amazing. Indianapolis is pretty cool. We visited an assembly plant for medium volume diesel engines, which was cool, but I had this instinctive negative reaction towards the plant and became quite sad without knowing why. Everyone else said the assembly plant improved their impression of Cummins, but for me it didn't. Suddenly, random memories of Globalfoundries flooded my memory. Of mormons in the town saying things like: "your English is so good" and people asking what MIT stand for. The assembly plant didn't have technicans; it had operators with high school education. They had 70 seconds to screw certain things on the engine before the engine went to the next station. It was that low-end. Having worked in a super high tech semiconductor manufacturing plant that had no operators, this was super eye opening for me. And I realized that I have very extreme and very strong biases against uneducated people. I've always had these biases. I wanted to get away from manufacturing because I perceived manufacturing as a low-end job even though it was high-tech semiconductor manufacturing. Such pride.
My problem is probably that I rarely admit to myself that I am offended or hurt. I just excuse it as living in the wrong place. So when that stranger said my English is so good, I was like: man, I'm living in the wrong place. If I lived in Boston, I would never have this problem. But really the problem is me. I am offended and hurt, but I don't want to admit that I am. That I'm so prideful and so biased. No one ever has any control of their privileged or unprivileged family upbringing or their 'smart genes' or whatever allowed them to have a higher chance of getting exposed to other cultures and good education. And it's actually our fault as Asian Americans that people ask us where we are really from. It's because Asian Americans don't live in the mid-west and they don't live in the middle of nowhere. You can't blame people in the middle of nowhere for not understanding you if you choose never to live there and expose those people to yourself.
Anyway, that's all talk. Biases take a long time to get rid of. You need to know those people and love them and hang out with them and be best friends with them to get rid of the bias.
