Sunday, November 07, 2010

Qualified Congratulations

From the major Sacramento newspaper:

A team of four Sacramento State students has won a national engineering competition, beating out teams from UC Berkeley, Stanford and UCLA.

Ariana Castillo, Manuel Ramirez, Felix Ortiz and Phillip Booker, all juniors at California State University, Sacramento, won first place in an academic competition last week at the national gathering of the Society for Hispanic Professional Engineers in Cincinnati.


As I wrote in a comment on that article: While I congratulate the students on their success, I wonder why a race-based organization for "professional engineers" even exists. What insight does being Hispanic bring to the engineering field?

This begs the question: are they not good enough to compete against white, black, Asian, or any other engineers?

2 comments:

mmazenko said...

It's clearly something you won't ever truly understand, being middle class, suburban, and white, nor will I. If the level playing field existed and the achievement gap were closed and human resource offices were literally color blind, then you might have a point.

But race-free utopia isn't here yet, despite desires to believe we have truly transcended prejudice in our society. From everyone I know, and from everything I hear, we haven't. You don't have to believe it, and it's good to keep asking the question, but it's a reality.

scott mccall said...

being an engineer in a hispanic dominated community.....there's alot of "hispanic only" organizations and scholarships. oh, and hispanics get interest free loans, or scholarships, just for being hispanic even if their GPS is below 2.0......where the white community can't get any form of monetary aid even with a 3.8.....