Grad School Musings: USC Rules the World Around Me and Filipinos in Grad School in General

These days somehow its USC this and USC that.

My mom works at an elementary school near there.

I am more likely to go there when there's something happening, including this concert they had with that myspace phenomena Passion, and Bambu, this one-woman act show about multiracialism that my co-wager dragged me, to and the latest, a screening of the Linguist with much apologies to the Queen of El Monte.

Almost all the people I know in grad school somehow end up at USC, despite that place costing a bunch of money.

There are quite a few folks I know earning Master of Social Work like Aileen.

There are future nonprofiteers like this one dude who works where I work named Mike.

There is a Ph.D candidate like Chiara in Education who will be doing research on Pinays.

There is one other dude named George at the School of Communications, who helped named Historic Filipinotown, and is looking to bring his research project to the wider Fil-Am community.

Meanwhile at the UC's, all I know is one guy named Paolo in education, who incidentally was a Pilipino UCLA transfer student but not a PTSPer but nonetheless helped us out at PTSP.

I'm curious as to what that's driven by. You'd think by virtue of UC being the public school, they would have more of us. Are they just that more disengaged from the LA community? Do they have impossible standards?

But there's a world beyond USC and UCLA.

Thinking more broadly about peer Filipinos in grad school, in my collection of 460 friends not going to SC or LA, I could almost count the number of people on one hand, (that is assuming I'm not counting finger joints and what not and just the typical phalange digits with the Arabic base-10 system.) Here's whom I know:

-An Economics M.A.
-An Asian Am M.A. going Ph.D
-An English M.A.
-Two Law Students
-A Counseling M.A.
-Two TFA people

I'm also struck by the fact that no one in my circle (with the notable exception of a friend Char knows) at Private Creme-de-la-creme high school where 99% of the graduating class goes to 4-year universities, is even in grad school. Mind you, Creme-de-la-creme High has a garbageload of its students in Grad School, mostly a bunch of law students. But as far as my circle of Filipinos at Creme-de-la Creme goes, were still at nil.

Perhaps that's driven by us being cheap, practical-minded Filipinos.