The Foreign Colony In Caltech’s Department of Electrical Engineering
12/04/2012
Below, Paul Nachman suggests that readers cast their eyes "on the graduate-student roster for Caltech’s Department of Electrical Engineering". I did this, and I note, using the patented "what kind of name is that" stereotyping technique, that less than one fifth of the class has a name you would have found in an engineering class in America in 1960.
Diversity wasn’t totally absent from American at that point — any one of the foreign names might have been studying engineering in an American school at any time. I. M. Pei, a native of Shanghai, was studying architecture in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts in 1935.
But he would have been the only one — a member of a minority group. He would have been surrounded, in fact, by Americans. At Caltech, it’s the Americans who are surrounded.
The names below are so weird that "Carlos Roberto Gonzalez" seems like a breath of air from home.
- Behrooz Abiri
- Ahmed Akgiray
- Ron Appel
- Aristotelis Asimakopoulou
- Hamad Hamze Bajgiran
- Roy Blankman
- Subhonmesh Bose
- Steven Bowers
- Michael Burd
- Wuhan Desmond Cai
- Chieh-feng Chang
- Han-Chieh Chang
- Samson Chen
- Kaushik Dasgupta
- Theodoros Dikaliotis
- Ran Duan
- David Foor
- William Frankland
- Qiurui Fu (Amy)
- Eyal En Gad
- Vikash Gunreddy
- Masoud Asanjan Farivar
- Lingwen Gan
- Carlos Roberto Gonzalez
- Wael Halbawi
- David Hall
- Chao Han
- Shuo Han
- Andrew Homyk
- Yu Horie
- Roarke Horstmeyer
- Kun Huang (Ms.)
- Wentao Huang
- Kishore Jaganathan
- Mooseok Jang
- Dongyang Kang
- Jinho Kim
- Seyoon Kim
- Vinayak Ramya Korlakai
- Seung Ah Lee
- Yi-Shan Lee
- Derek Leong
- Chih-Hao Liu
- Hsi-Chun Liu
- Yang Liu
- Zhao Liu
- Ji Luo (Ms.)
- Matthew Loh
- Jordan Maslov
- Imran Malik
- Wei Mao
- Manuel Monge
- Abhirman Moturi
- Muhammad Mujeeb-U-Rahman
- Jayakrishnan Nair
- Mandheerej Nandra
- Meisam Honarvar Nazari
- Parham Noorzad
- Samet Oymak
- Alex Pai
- Akshay Pai
- Piya Pal
- Shuo (Sean) Pang
- Qiuyu Peng
- Yamuna Phal (Ms.)
- Mayank Raj
- Aditya Rajagopal
- Jian Ren
- Damon Russell
- Saman Saeedi
- Amirreza Safaripour
- Christos Santis
- Penvipha Satsanarukkit
- Nicholas Scianmarello
- Jacob Sendowski
- Krishna Settaluri
- Constantine Sideris
- Scott Steger
- Ravi Teja Sukhavasi
- Albert Tan
- Srikanth Venkata Tenneti
- Matthew Thill
- Christos Thrampoulidis
- Brian Thompson
- Zhiying Wang
- Kelsey Whitesell
- Ming Fai Wong
- Hao Wu
- Changhong Zhao
- Guoan Zheng
- Haojiang (Edward) Zhou
- Sinan Zhao
- Yu Zhao
- Guoan Zheng
- He Zhao (Ms.)
- Hongchao Zhou