From here
Apparently, an 18 year old was able to con students and staff at Stanford for a full 8 months before getting caught. She actually got these people to let her stay in the dorm, for free, and nobody did any security check until the very end.
Sad, very sad.
I searched for her on Facebook. She seems to be on it, in the Silicon Valley network, and I asked her to be my friend. There’s also a group called “Azia Kim is my hero,” with 81 members.
She’s pretty cute. If she needs a place to stay, my room is available! I hope my girlfriend would be cool with it.
That’s fantastic. Well done to her, I say.
Asian + felt pressured by parents + slipping through the cracks of a major university for so long… someone is going to bring* it* up.
SWEET BABY HUMONGOUS!
That site does not like my version of Firefox! Kicked me right off the Web!
Why would anyone do this? A funny or a sad or a scary story?
What bothered me about the story was that Stanford has an “Asian-American theme dorm.”
Christ almighty, they have segregated dorms now? Isn’t one of the cool things about going away to college that you meet different sorts of people?
Figuratively squatting for eight months, I hope, otherwise one would get a nasty case of hemroids.
I find that odd, too. I mean - sure it sounds kind of cool, but most of us “asian-americans” have had to spend a significant portion of our lives with our asian-americans and then there are some like me who were highly discouraged from having white friends. College was the best time of my life; I got to meet so many new pipples.
I do feel a bit sad for her. I certainly do understand the pressure. I’m NOT going to get into details, but I’ve done a few things to make my parents think I was the perfect young Indian daughter when I most certainly was not.
You guys haven’t been in college for awhile, have you? Nowadays there are segregated dorms and eating halls and student centers everywhere. Black only, Asian only, Latino only, the works. The next thing you know some ethnic group is going to start lobbying for their own drinking fountains!
What I found odd was that someone would name their kid (or the kid would take the name) Azian Kim.
I have GOT to stop taking these thread titles so damn liteally! :eek:
Seriously, my wife is in charge of residence hall assignments at our local small college (I’ve been beaten into submission on that one point – they’re “residence halls,” not “dorms” :rolleyes: ) Anyway, this is something she has nightmares about – cleaning out the “residence halls” at the end of the semester and discovering that someone who isn’t even enrolled has been living in one of the rooms.
Here’s another article about this young woman and how the story unraveled when the dorm staff wanted to make a yearbook, but couldn’t get any more information about her. And another article about someone who squatted in the physics lab.
As I remember the confusion in college during freshman year with regard to housing, I can totally see how this could happen. My dorm room during freshman year had four of us in a room meant for three. After a couple of weeks, it became clear that a couple of guys never showed up to campus, so two of my roommates moved down the hall to a double room.
As a former RA, hall director, and area director, I’m pretty surprised that this worked for so long. Somebody was definitely asleep at the switch. It’s easy (and obvious) to go after the RA whose floor she lived on - as it’s pretty much standard everywhere I’ve worked to get a printout of who should be where, and occasionally you have to move registered students who’ve illegally swapped rooms. For a number of reasons, it’s essential to know who lives where.
Time to fight some ignorance… Ethnic-themed halls or houses have been around since the 1960s, and are most prominent at selective schools (Cornell, MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley are schools I know that have them off the top of my head). When students of color first arrived (in large numbers) at predominantly White campuses after 1965, they often experienced outright racism (“you’re not qualified to be here”) to subtler forms of microaggressive actions (“can I touch your hair,” “what is the Latino perspective on [insert large societal issue here]”). Students in many cases lobbied and protested campus administrators for spaces for the members of a community to “let their hair down,” and be in environments that were more familiar and sustaining. In the case of MIT’s “Chocolate City,” it’s been around for about 33 years.
It’s assumptive and a marker of White privilege to prioritize the importance of integrating and exploring other cultures while not considering that markers of other cultures are not necessarily present or apparent. All students are well immersed in WASP culture at predominantly White institutions, because that is the very cultural context in which these schools were established and founded. It is only in the past 30 years that students of color, alumni, academics, and philanthropists have been able to have a say in the direction of school governance.
Not every student of color wants to live in an ethnic-themed house, and the students tend to do so for very individual reasons. One trend among African-American students in Black theme houses is the ability to live in a community that is predominantly African African, after a childhood of being “the only one” in majority White schools. Theme houses exist, and have existed for years - for students who are LGBTQ, for students interested in certain activities (outdoors, speaking a foreign language), and let’s not forget the Greek system. I’ve discovered that students do not always stay in the theme houses for their entire college experience - it has as much to do with individual racial identity formation and preferences. The theme halls also often have a social justice and programming mission, and students who live there will often say that the only reason that they feel a strong connection to their institution is the fact that they have a link to the friends and programming in the theme house.
(FTR, I never lived in a theme house or a frat house, though I had the chance to do the latter. It’s just a topic I’ve researched in the past. I certainly can relate to the weirdness of being one of five Black kids in a 900 student residence hall, though.)
I could see this happening.
I lived off campus (at my grandparents’ house) for my last two years of college.
However, all of my study groups, my classes (of course), and my whole social life was on campus.
Being a night-owl, I generally studied on campus until I dropped from exhaustion. I slept on campus more than half the time.
I had a variety of my favorite sleeping spots: on a couch on the 7th floor of a
residential college, a couch in the library, etc. After a few months of this, I even talked a residential college master into allowing me access to one of the dorms with my university key card, and was also issued an elevator/bathroom key. This particular dorm had floor bathrooms, so I could shower in the morning if I ended up sleeping on a couch all night.
I kept spare clothes in the trunk of my car, along with books and study materials. Once, I had to stop by my car to get a book, and an acquaintance walking with me expressed surprise at the neatly laid out piles of clothes, etc. A friend and I convinced him that I had figured out a great way to save money for college–simply squat in the dorms! I guess it wasn’t actually far from the truth–but I did actually have a place to live.
On the other hand, I also had a university ID and permission to be in that residential college, at least.
“Police are currently investigating the situation. They could press trespassing or theft of services charges — Stanford Housing charges unauthorized visitors $175 daily, bringing Kim’s eight-month liability up to $42,000.”
For $42k she should at least have gotten a meal plan.
I’m glad to know my being uncomfortable with segregation is simply because of my “White” privilege. I was under the mistaken assumption that I found it jarring because of my observation of the history and general nature of racially segregated societies and communities, as opposed to mixed ones. If, in the future, I find myself bothered by racial segregation, I’ll be sure to run it past you to ensure it’s not just that old “White” privilege bustin’ out again.
It’s my understanding that she sneaked into the cafeteria to eat. If Stanford is anything like my alma mater, the cafeteria cashiers are work-study students who don’t give a shit who comes through, so that was probably pretty easy.
I wonder if her parents knew what she was up to? I mean, did she lie to them and tell them that she was admitted to Stanford? On the comments page below the article the OP linked to, some people claim she was in the Stanford system but had no ID. Huh? Unless that simply means that as a virtue of applying to the school she was in the system.
Personally, I think she might have tried any number of alternatives. For instance, working at the university might have given her an opportunity to take classes for free and even eventually earn a degree. (Lots of Harvard staff members have done this.) Or why not go to the best UC or CSU she could get into, kicking ass there, and getting a grad degree at Stanford? I’m amazed at the number of students who don’t think what she did was a big deal.
Are you even slightly familiar with the research on racial identity development? It is fairly common for people of color to feel out of place and excluded when they are a (numerically) minority. To deal with these feelings of isolation, they often seek out students with similar experiences. It doesn’t mean they create an artificial world where everyone is like them. Also, it should be obvious that the common link of an ethnic or racial identity is only one aspect of identity. There is considerable diversity in geographic origin, family status, social class, political views, interests, etc., even among a group of, say, Asian students.
We’re talking about housing, where students choose to live. Last time I looked, you’ll see plenty of “racial segregation” in the grouping of roommates. At all the campuses I’ve worked at, most students live with people of the same race. White kids tend to live with other White kids. Indian kids tend to live with other Indian kids. They still have friends and colleagues from many different groups. If students of color choose to live with other students with the same racial and/or ethnic background, what’s wrong with that?
I’ve worked in res halls. People have asked to live with each other based on ethnic background (I remember two Italian, Catholic guys who wanted to room together), preexisting relationships (best friends from HS), religion, or even activities (athletes, etc.). I’ve also had experiences where a group of White students living with a Black student made him so uncomfortable (accusing him of stealing from them) that he asked specifically for a Black roommate.
Living with someone, or living in a res hall is not racial segregation. If a campus is predominantly White, and your classmates, lab partners, professors, and circle of friends include a lot of White people, how is that segregation? I would submit that it’s impossible to attend a school like Stanford, Yale, MIT, or Cornell, for instance, as a student of color and have a non-integrated experience. It’s certainly possible to never interact with people of color in a meaningful way at many predominantly White campuses, though.
Stanford also has a Mexican-American themed dorm, my friend lives in it.