Jason & Susan

Did you know that you could go to Google and find out the latest population estimate by just typing “Population of United States” or “Population of China” in the search engine? Well, according to the latest estimate from July 2007, United States has a population of 301,139,947 people and China has a population of 1,321,851,888 people. The difference is about one billion people!

There are many ways a country’s population can affect the basic standard of living for its citizens, but today, this post is about the affect of that daunting population size and what it means in terms of admissions to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also known as M.I.T.

Jason is a member of M.I.T. Educational Council (EC), meaning he interviews applicants for the undergraduate admissions to M.I.T. Since we live in China, most of the applicant pool here are local Chinese students who are applying as international students to the undergraduate program. These students attend top-notch high schools across China and are literally the best of the best. They have perfect grades, score 99 percentile on various college admissions test (S.A.T., Chinese “gao kao”, etc…), speak near fluent English (though never been overseas), and accomplished many things you didn’t think possible of high schoolers. These are the caliber of students that Jason has interviewed the last two years. These Chinese students really put American high school students to shame.

If it were possible (and if it was up to him to decide), Jason would admit every one of these students to M.I.T. They’d all do extremely well and accomplish great things in life. Unfortunately, this is a country of 1.3 billion people and M.I.T. is an American University. What that means is that M.I.T. has limited acceptance for international students — something like one student per country. Since China has so many people, the college accepts five Chinese students every year. Five out of 1.3 billion people!

We’re not sure the exact total number of applicants from China each year, but the rough estimate is maybe several hundreds? Regardless, the odds are not good. Last year, Jason interviewed around 10 students and none of them got admitted to the school. This year, the applicant pool is much bigger and Jason interviewed almost 20 students. There are more applicants this year than E.C.’s available to interview, so Jason has been overwhelmed with interviews every week for the last two months! Even now, he is still receiving requests for interviews but had to turn them down because work has been very busy.

Last week, one student showed up at our front step 8:30 in the morning. Jason was already off to work and Susan was rushing to get ready. Our doorbell is very weak and cannot be heard from inside (though quite loud on the outside). By time Susan came downstairs to grab breakfast, it was 8:45am. She heard loud pounding on the door and it was a student standing outside looking for Jason. Susan was confused as to why the student showed up since all the interviews take place in the evening.

Apparently, there was confusion and miscommunication regarding the time for the interview. Jason had arranged 8:30pm interview but since China uses military time (8:30pm should be written as 20:30), the student mistaken the interview as being in the morning! And to make matters slightly complicated, she flew in from another province just for the interview and her return flight was in the afternoon. Fortunately, Jason’s company (Roche) is nearby and Jason was able to meet the student during lunchtime before her return flight. Otherwise, it would really S-U-C-K to fly all the way out here for an interview only to be sent right back home.

The crisis was diverted but because of this incident, we realize how serious these students are about applying for M.I.T.! We didn’t realize that some of the students Jason interviewed are from other provinces. If we had known, we would have arranged the interviews to take place during the weekends for convenience to the students. We thought he was only interviewing the Shanghai pool. Looking at all the applications in hindsight, it turned out that quite a number of students traveled long ways just for an one-hour interview and that’s only a small component of the entire admissions process.

Anyway, we feel sad that most of these students will probably not get into M.I.T., unless they’re one of the lucky five. At the same time, we believe that even if they don’t get into M.I.T., they’ll probably get into other schools. One student received a full-ride scholarship to Tokyo University but turned it down because he felt a Western education was better. We are certain that these students will get into a good school, if not M.I.T. These students have great determination and they’ll succeed no matter where they go to school. We wish them the best!

In retrospect, we realized that it is not by choice that anyone is born of a particular country, social class, family, or time period. Yet, we take for granted so many things that others have to fight hard for and still never achieve in their lifetime. Consider how fortunate we are to be U.S. citizens and not have to compete with one billion others for things — school, job, limited resources, etc…

Reminder to self: Count our blessings each and every day.