I'm one of those Asian-Americans that applied to only "elite" schools due to constant parental pressure and did "enough" to get accepted to most. Although all t

I'm one of those Asian-Americans that applied to only "elite" schools due to constant parental pressure and did "enough" to get accepted to most. Although all this happened a decade ago, the challenges these days seem mostly the same, if not trite, in the sense that Asians seem to typically over-value institutionalized education and focus on a narrow set of activities for whatever cultural reason ... leading to racial bias from colleges and conventional life choices from Asians. For me though, I just enjoyed trying a bunch of different stuff out and was fortunate enough to excel at a variety of things that I guess these colleges weren't expecting from an Asian. These interests include(d) linguistics, journalism, public speaking, student government, graphics + layouts + grids, game design, acrobatics, and somehow even ended up as an Eagle Scout (shrug) ... on top of hyper-accelerated math, science and tech stuff expected I guess of Asian students. Didn't sleep much though. Also, after attending one day of Harvard's Campus Preview Weekend, my gut said "uh ... no," and went to MIT instead. Very happy about that choice in hindsight, purely based on the people I met and the meritocracy instilled in the students; I doubt I use even 25% of course material in the stuff I work on these days. The most important lesson that I did learn at the end of the day is that general society is led to believe that people should/can master only one or two tasks, a possible relic from industrialism. Instead, people should aim to become polymathic, which becomes exponentially easier by learning across diverse interests and realizing that there are many common threads across seemingly different fields -- a personal and particular implementation of "learning how to learn." * As a side note, San Gabriel Valley? Never been so can't really guess, but I would bet that Cupertino schools were much tougher. Thankfully, we had a certain neighborhood fruit company that inspired some of us to become pirates instead of joining the navy, and to experiment with Learning Some Divinity (eventually).