David Cheng: In our study, we studied what we need to do in terms of assessing the needs of Asian and Asian American students in CUNY. And this is a very selective colloquium; all of you here have been invited, so you are sort of the chosen few that we feel you can contribute to our study in terms of understanding better the profile and the needs of the CUNY Asian and Asian American student. William and Julia, can you take some notes, because at the end of the session we also need to present to the group. If I’m talking, I won’t be able to, you know, I think it’s better to have more people taking notes so we can share. So, did you guys get the letter of invitation? On the letter of invitation there’s a whole list of things that we’re going to talk about, in terms of the conceptive groups. I was told that most people wanted to be in this group, and that’s too overwhelming, so we decided to split people up and talk about the topics. The people that are here, we can stay with the topics but at the same time get some new topics from you, if you feel there any things not on this list that we can add.
I’ll start by telling you a little about myself and how the Asian American and also the topic that, for me, is sort of a burning issue. I don’t want to influence you though, I think that you can come up with your own burning issue about Asian, Asian American students in CUNY. For me, I’m a clinical psychologist, and I’ve been in private practice since the late 90s; I don’t want you to figure out how old I am. But, I was trying to be a model Asian student, always trying to accomplish things as early as possible, finish school and do everything fast. I started out going through analytic training, post-doctoral analytic training, all my patients were predominantly upper middle class and middle class white, Jewish, patients. It’s a psycho-analytic institute so most of the faculty also subscribed to Freud and the whole analytic orientation. In my private practice, I realized that I was serving a particular population, and there was a large population that I hadn’t understood and hadn’t had a chance to work with and put my theories into practice.
So I took an affiliation with the New York City Police Department, and with the police department I saw the policemen for therapy and counseling, and there again I served a white population, Irish and Italian population, and I said to myself, what happened to the people of color, Asian, Black, Hispanic, that would never really come to my private practice. These are people that don’t want to believe in psychotherapy. So I started with Baruch College, and really it’s been a journey in terms of understanding and trying to study the needs of Asian students and also Asians in general, and how little was done in terms of understanding the psychology of Asians in America.
Since Baruch, I’ve really had a chance to do a lot of research and do a lot of clinical work with the Asian and Asian American students. Just like my experience with the police department, people generally downplay counseling, especially personal and psychological counseling; “oh it’s not important, we don’t believe in that, it’s a really specialized kind of thing, if I’m not a Jewish, intellectual person, why would I want to talk about my problems?” You really don’t go for that. There’s also this thing, I mean, you’re crazy, you really have to need psychological help to go to counseling. So, it’s really downplayed, its viewed as a luxury, pretty much. With the police department, I was invited to talk on TV a lot in the mid 80’s, when there were a whole string of suicides among police officers, where they were shooting themselves, and the talk was that there was no way to get help confidentially outside the police department. Also, the shooting with the gun was easy to come by, so they would do that.
By the time I came to Baruch, again, people really didn’t…first of all, Asians don’t go into counseling, not psychological, personal counseling anyway. I even published a paper myself in the mid-90’s comparing Asian and Caucasian students in terms of stress and seeking help, and it was shown really that Asian students tend to come in for academic and career counseling, and they wouldn’t say personal. But the stress level, when you measure it, is even higher than that of Caucasian students, but their seeking help was less. That was something we wondered about and wanted to do research about. Since then, the tide has sort of turned a little bit. We’re seeing more Asian students come in for personal counseling nowadays. But again, counseling was downplayed until the late 90’s, when there was a string of suicides on campus at Baruch. Two out of three suicides on campus were Asian women.
So, again, people pay attention when somebody jumps out the window, then people say wow, it’s an important issue, students are very stressed, students do have problems, and they don’t find their way to counseling, they don’t find a way to get some help. So that’s when, again, the interest sort of perked, we need to go around and we give a little more resources, but then the last few years again, things are good, we didn’t hear of anybody jumping out of windows, and the need is lessened again, people don’t pay as much attention. Especially the Asian population, they are good students, they don’t make any waves, they’re fine. But in the counseling center, they come in, and a lot of Asian students come in with multiple problems. It’s a trend in the country that many counseling centers in the country are seeing a lot more severe psychological problems in general. We don’t know why, we attribute it to maybe the changing times, medication, people’s awareness, stress, whatever. So we’re seeing a lot more things like, for me anyway, there’s depression, anxiety, and suicides; that’s the thing that really turns people out, when you talk about stuff, that’s really important. I think these are the things that, really, we don’t want to get to that.
On the list today, for your concern, it doesn’t have to be waiting for someone to jump out of a window before we pay attention to them. We should really start paying attention to them long before that, when there’s a beginning. So I’ve had seminars with faculty, to alert them, what are the signs and symptoms to look for with your students if you feel that they have a problem that you can bring them in. So, that’s why its very important today, I want to hear from you. I think people here are from different places in the university, and your own experience in terms of what you feel, would be a hot topic, a burning issue, in terms of the needs, we’re talking about, the needs of the Asian and Asian American students. What you perceived are some of the needs you see in your work and how you think we can do something about it. I think I’ll shut up now, let’s go around, please introduce yourselves.
Liz McCaffrey: I’m Liz McCaffrey, I’m director of counseling and advising at Queens College. I agree with what you’re saying, and you were saying that you’re seeing a lot more of Asian students in counseling, but I’m also wondering if you’re seeing more Asian students because you have more Asian students or the Asians are coming in greater number. I think that our issue that comes before the need, it comes to how do we market counseling services so that Asian students feel comfortable using them. I, too did some research on this about ten years ago for my dissertation, my dissertation was about expectations on counseling and willingness to seek help with a Latino population, Asian population, versus white population. I didn’t get a whole lot of big differences, but Asian students were more likely to be willing to seek counseling for self-concept issues, and what came under self-concept issues were things like assertiveness, shyness, this kind of thing.
White students were more likely to seek counseling for depression. What I thought in thinking this through was that the Asian students were really expressing their willingness to seek help for what they found became a problem for them in college, because their lack of assertiveness, their shyness, their dealings with authority figures were hampering them in the classroom so that they were thinking that they could come to white counseling so they could learn good white skills to be more successful in the classroom. I think that we have to think about marketing these things towards, not to say that we don’t then deal with the whole person and whole issues, but I think that some of the programming has to become programming that connects with what they’d be allowed to go to counseling for. Again, the shame issue, all those kinds of things. You have to make it acceptable. Because, certainly when I see Asian students and once they get engaged in counseling, they’re very okay with it, but of course it’s a big secret.
David Cheng: So marketing means, perhaps, trying to couch it in a way that is practical for them? You think they’d come in for a practical issue?
Liz McCaffrey: Oh, yes. And they’d definitely come in for straight up advising issues. There’s something to be said for counseling/advising services because it makes it more acceptable all the way around, not just for Asians.
David Cheng: Our counseling center used to be called psychological services, counseling and psychological services just like everyone else, but again, we wanted to, just like you said, and this is already done, we wanted to market it so it’d be more user friendly, like people don’t get intimidated, so we had a survey and had a list of suggested names, what do you think would be least threatening. And it comes up with counseling center seems to be less…more generic and less threatening. But what we’re doing secretly is, we’re doing personal counseling under the guise of counseling center. I really do see a trend though; well perhaps Baruch really does have more Asian students, so we see more, but I wonder to what extent also is that trend that the country is changing, there are more Asian students who are, like you said, how can I be successful, [inaudible], then it’s acceptable to go to counseling as well. Now the question is how to market that.
Kyoko Toyama: I think you said a bunch of things that I want to build on [inaudible]. I’m not sure if the agency will want to learn what skills, again Tom is talking about the diversity of the Asian students, you have Asian students coming straight from Asia, Asian students who are first generation, second generation, third generation, Asian students who came through South Asia, ethnically they are Asian but they are South American.
David Cheng: I was amazed that 80% are foreign born, she said 80% of Asian students are foreign born. So they may not be international students, but their parents came when they were young; so they were foreign born but they came at 5 years old, but they’re still Asian Americans.
Kyoko Toyama: The students who are born and raised here, I’m sure they have awareness of their own ethnicity and interacting with other groups, but the foreign student they come here, they don’t know what the minority, what their ethnic identity, so again David, being a good student, that sort of value Asian students have, they want to be a good student. To be a good student, they have to learn the skills. one of the things, since we wanna talk about marketing, I’m Kyoko Toyama, I’m a counselor at LaGuardia CC, and our department had an interesting thing yesterday, a groundbreaking new initiative related to this new marketing method.
Some students, not only Asian students, some students who are not born here or are minorities, they don’t understand counseling, its across the board, not just Asian students. So instead of waiting for them to come in, we teach new student seminars, and that’s required for every new student. We decided to have an academic screening day, which sounds very academic. What we did was, we’re trying to target the students who are at risk, probation students, but also we brought all the brochures about counseling services, and we have thematic workshops after the probation workshops. We were out there in a huge atrium in front of the library, and we have never done this before, and we set the table and you won’t believe how many students came to us, and of course they saw us just sitting there talking to the students. Of course, we have agendas, but still we’re talking about different questions, mostly academic, and we’re looking at the transcript, because that’s what they have to pick up from the other table and we start talking about why they’re on probation and why their grades are slipping. It’s not an ideal place to do counseling, but students are okay, they’re just dying to ask questions, and you won’t believe not only how many students, but many Asian students who are usually not in our offices knocking on the door to make an appointment, so, I think it’s true, we have to really change our whole mentality about waiting and we have to outreach, physically, and maybe through the classes, using our faculty support.
David Cheng: Okay, so you said, outreach was using probation students with transcripts, you had a table there? But there was an occasion,
Kyoko Toyama: It was a college support kind of event, and it’s very non-threatening.
[assorted comments]: It was like an academic health day, wellness day, checkup, it was like depression screening day.
David Cheng: Health fair, but depression screening day from our experience is that people are very shy, like oh what’s that, take it and then go away. What we tried to do was talk to them, and make it seem less threatening.
Liz McCaffrey: I think the difference here is that it’s posed as academic, the students will come for the information because it’s academic. It’s about being a good student.
Kyoko Toyama: Good students, I’m not only talking about probation students, good students who should be in phi beta kappa and all these things, foreign students and foreign born students don’t know what they are. What is the honor society? So they get the letter, and they throw it out. So we are losing good students who can be in the pool of the honors program. So we are hitting both ends, not only just students on probation.
David Cheng: I’m sorry today that Susan [Lock] couldn’t come she is an honor student program director, and she said wow, majority of honor students are Asian.
Kyoko Toyama: I have so many things to say, cause I’ve been in CUNY for 17 years, and one of the things we always talk about, it’s very hard to recruit counselors who represent different ethnic groups. Because we’re talking about visibility, and it’s very important, we have about 20 different counselors and we speak 6-7 different languages. Including college studies. Students can even choose, sometimes, yes, Asian counselors, but also more training, because just because some of our colleagues have been there for many years, they didn’t have a mandated course in multiple [inaudible], some of them were very eager to go to workshops and conferences, but otherwise they haven’t updated their skills in [inaudible].
Janette Alejandra Treue: I’m Janette Alejandra Treue, and I’m assistant director at Queensborough Community College counseling. I wanted to respond to the two points that you raised. The first point I wanted to respond to was the outreach. Before we even get to the outreach, well, we’re talking about Asian Americans, for me my passion is not how much to put into one umbrella, but to identify who we’re talking about. We’re talking about the Chinese, the Koreans, the Indian, the Afghanis, who’re we talking about. My experience with these groups has been completely different. That’s my big thing here. In addition to the outreach, what we did just this past Wednesday is, we did a whole faculty development workshop to make the faculty be aware of, and the topic we talked about is arranged marriages, and this is a topic I chose only because a lot of students I’ve seen have issues with arranged marriages; and we’re talking mostly about Indian students, Muslim students. I thought coming from the students what their need is, through a whole faculty development workshop, people have asked me, what did you do when students are going into arranged marriages? So they’re anxious about the workshop. I wanted to be open to everybody, the whole campus student, staff, and faculty. I did a lot of campusing. Queensborough is a nice campus, it’s an open campus, we don’t have an atrium, but we do have these large stairs that connect two buildings, and these stairs, we have a lot of students that congregate, and it’s all different ethnic students. So we have the Sikh students here, the Muslims here, the Chinese here, the Latinos there, all along the steps. Nice Groups. Going out and doing outreach, I walk around the steps all the time and say “ Hi, how’re you doing?” I know a lot of students from teaching the seminar class. SO I started doing a lot of work in terms of the arranged marriages, and some of them are interested them, mostly the Muslim students and the Hindu students. They kind of look at me, “oh, no”, and this is better for the faculty to have an awareness of your values, your experiences, your culture, and they like that. It’s more than them sharing who they are to the faculty.
So, Wednesday, we had over 25 students come to this arranged marriage workshop, which I thought was just amazing, and they weren’t only Muslim, there were Muslims and there were a nice group of Sikhs. We had some staff, but unfortunately no faculty. Meanwhile, we gave all the faculty brochures, emails went out the faculty twice, and there were also a lot of events happening on campus, a lot of things on Wednesday. The outreach, the way we designed it was similar to what you’re doing…you’re out there, in front of them, and you tell them here, this is what we do, this is what we want, this is for you. The outcome for them is that their professors will get to know what their issues are, in terms of arranged marriage. But that was one part of the Asian group that showed up. That is one thing I wanted to share.
The other thing I wanted to share is in terms of the counselors and our ethnicity, and we’re right now in the process of hiring two new counselors, and we had the pool of all these resumés. I didn’t look at all of them, but Dr. [Roston] has, and I said, well, is it a nice, diverse pool of counselors, because we want an Asian American counselor, and I don’t think we have an Asian. You can’t tell just by the last names [inaudible]. So my issue now is, where do we advertise so we can get them besides CUNY, besides the website and in the New York Times. But that would be an issue, where do we advertise to get a diverse set of resumés for a counseling position.
Kyoko Toyama: Dr. Yoshida, who is [inaudible], what he did was, he created something that, even to the west coast, to recruit Asian Americans. [inaudible]. But when you look at the composition of doctoral students, there are a lot of Asians, many Asian students.
David Cheng: They’re growing. Our internship program, we have 1, 2, 3, and Doreen on the other side, we have about 4 or 5 out of the 10. So half, are Asian. We have one Korean , one from the Philippines, one Chinese, one Indian, and I’m missing somebody. Actually, two Chinese. We are trying to have a diverse group. Not that we try to make it like the quota system, but it just happens that we have some good candidates coming up who are Asian now. It’s growing, but it’s not growing that fast, I mean it’s in a slow, long process, I know from Dave. Also, just in counseling, because I am the director, because people would rather go to a place that is more accepting. The faculty in Baruch, still has the highest Asian population. I don’t think that the percentage of faculty at Baruch is close to anywhere comparable to the ratio. Do you know, Arthur, about the ratio? There’s just a handful of Asian faculty, except for the library. Arthur is the chief librarian. You want to introduce yourself?
Arthur Downing: I’m Arthur Downing, I’m the chief information officer responsible for both the library and the computer center. My interest in all of this really gets in, talking about the psycho-social dynamics, deals with encounters over service desks, as you heard, there just isn’t as much contact between faculty and the Asian American student as in the general population. We’re finding the same thing with the service desks, particularly in the library where we do a lot more research. Asian American students are disproportionately high in terms of their visits in the library; they spend a lot more time there, but have much smaller disproportionate use of reference surfaces. There have been a number of studies that have been done on the concept of library anxiety, that is generalizing on the students, but there are always measures of higher levels in international students and non-native speakers, and in Baruch Asian students fit into both those categories. One of the wonderful people leading in that field is actually a librarian at Baruch who did a study there and found that much higher level of library anxiety among our Asian and non-native speakers, among the affective dimension of it.
What I’ve found is, and I’ve sort of let it be known among the students, that we’re trying to find out what is causing this. I’ve had a number of interviews with students, formal and informal, and we’ve come up with a number of strategies that the students use to sort of cope with these situations. Primarily, one course is avoidance, the other is like surveillance, I talk to students who tell me that they will observe the desk on a number of occasions, and watch the dynamics of particular librarians with all their students, particularly with other Asian students before they will choose the librarian. They will hold off from asking a question at the desk until the right time with the right librarian. And they share this information among their own network and I’ve talked to Asian students who have told me that when they arrived they were oriented to the campus by other students who told them which librarian. I’ve had discussions, I guess I’ve told David about these interviews, students came to see me because they heard I was interested in making changes, and I had people burst into tears talking to me about what they observed and how they felt they were treated. They were really discussions I should have had with you, because some things we do as part of our job, they personalize it.
There’s a great deal of library literature on how best to work with non-native speakers, and most of it is terribly flawed and just faulty. One of the techniques we were taught is that as soon as you identify they’re not native speakers, give them a pad and pen and tell them to write down their question, because you don’t want to misunderstand their question. Students take great offense at this, among our profession, you would not get this reaction. Most of it is very focused on what, again, the informational dimension is of our work, even though repeatedly the studies have shown that satisfaction with our work is not based on whether we can answer the question or not but how we can conduct the dynamics of it. But it just doesn’t work that way. They come up with coping strategies. One student told me that she gave up trying to get this librarian to be friendly with her, but it was the only person she could ever seem to work with. So she just started, and she felt this was very convenient, she started complementing the librarian, and she opened the interaction with regard to her hair, what dress she was wearing that day, and it’s very unusual because I recorded a great number of library desk transactions. You don’t get [inaudible], so for people to do that is quite an effort, and she just unloaded on me this one person, and said she’s made to feel stupid. For me, I don’t know what to do, I talk to people, I brought the issue up on my own staff to be more attentive to it, but you don’t really know how to carry on this interaction.
Kyoko Toyama: Some of the students just go to anybody they feel comfortable with instead of coming to us, so that’s why it’s important for faculty to understand that they cannot be counselors, but they could be the first contact.
David Cheng: Just like Arthur just said, he feels that he doesn’t know how to do it, but you really are such an important person there that she opens up to you or talks to you about this particular problem. You’re the contact person. So maybe the outreach is to the faculty and the staff in terms of also doing some kind of service group to talk about how to make referrals, how to bridge, okay, Arthur is a great guy and the library is so known now, Baruch has done a good job, but there are people who are not interested. Like you said, when you ran the workshop and no faculty showed up. They are not interested in the students, and that shows. I think people will continue if you show an interest. Sometimes Asian students may not be assertive and talkative, and not given the attention, and maybe if the faculty and staff would just pay a little more attention, then we can perhaps bridge that. Now can we come back to you?
Edward Ma: I just wanted to know in Baruch or any other CUNY campus, is there any system, referral system to all faculty, to help faculty get oriented how to spot Asian American problems. Sometimes it is just through the academic less threatening information, they get secondary gains, but their basic problems are still there, so they can refer for these deep rooted problems to a specialist who can try to treat deep-rooted problems, not the academic problem itself.
Liz McCaffrey: We do send to all faculty, as far as making referrals and dealing with distressed or disruptive students, but I also think that unfortunately faculty are sometimes equal opportunity, not paying attention at all to, you know, so it’s not necessarily just Asian students that they don’t care what’s going on, it’s all their students, but you’re right, Asian students in particular sometimes don’t assert themselves at all whereas other students do, so the faculty can’t ignore them. It becomes that kind of getting faculty engaged, period. Some faculty are very engaged, and then there’s all this faculty that aren’t. There’s a group that’s engaged and a group that’s not.
Edward Ma: That’s a good generalization about personalized. But Chinese, they’re overly personalized, they’re so withdrawn, you have to work very hard to draw them out, that’s very hard, a lot of work, a lot of effort. That’s why the people if they have a family, very quick, right away they click. I have a family and the father’s academics, language, cultural barriers, that’s really multiple problems, very [inaudible]. There are so many screens. At LaGuardia, if you do the screening workshop, that’s very good. Through academics, [inaudible] how to function academically, and put them on the right track, that’s very good workshop and as a group, it helps them connect with each other.
Arthur Downing: One of the issues is, once a woman said, and I didn’t know what to answer, why is it that when I go to your library, and (she named some other CUNY libraries), I notice that the librarians don’t stand as close to me, or I notice some of the librarians touch other students on the shoulder, and they’re much friendlier to those than to me. That was way too personal; she has failed in not only getting good service from us, but at several other libraries, and she’s noticed this pattern. She thought at first because she was an Asian student that the librarians at our place and the other campuses, she noticed that they behaved differently toward her than the other students. They stood closer, they laughed more, they just seemed friendlier. Again, it seemed very personal here; I had failed in making a connection.
Edward Ma: My name is Edward Ma, I worked [inaudible], I worked at Cornell Hospital of Psychiatry for over 25 years. I’ve been connected to [inaudible], I am on several community boards, I admire this very very good to Asian Americans, you know, general information about the personal, physical intimacy, the Chinese, they are looking for physical intimacy, the trust, especially when you mention about personal intimacy, so they can feel comfortable to ask questions. I come from my own personal students, I’m a psycho therapist, but I have medical training in psychiatry. Just I established a group, for the community, because I feel that they need to utilize the resources. I tried to make a group, only four people came. It ended up with only two. One of them said, why do we have to [inaudible]. [inaudible] peers, hierarchy, Chinese have a very important hierarchy. [inaudible]
I have followed many of the American suicides, I find that when they need someone, I suggest to divide the foreign students, Asian/Asian Americans, because the student just came from Taiwan or from mainland or from Hong Kong two months ago and compared with students two years ago, quite different. They already oriented on their own, and think on their own already, and the foreign students, this is the problem, immigration especially, they worry the financial, language, status, loneliness, these components are so important that contribute to their learning difficulty, adjustment difficulty. I think when screening foreign students it is also very important to assess the totality of their success, their academic success, and personal adjustment. [inaudible] also very important. I think people are doing a tremendous job at Queens College and LaGuardia, and many of the students are so demanding, that’s why so many multiple problems very hard, how to [inaudible] you don’t know, there are so many multiple problems, that are illustrated as academic problems. [inaudible] heathen. So, I think you people are doing your best, with hidden problems, [voice tails off].
Kyoko Toyama: I myself was a foreign student many years ago, but I didn’t come to New York, so I had to struggle but I think I got adjusted to American culture very quickly. Students who come here from foreign countries, [inaudible], but they don’t have the luxury of being embraced by other people. You may be sitting with somebody who has been here for many years, who was born or raised, may be someone from the same country who came here as a foreign student. I was on the newspaper many times in this small town in Pennsylvania, but I was well taken care of by the college, by the community. But I think it was just different. But here, students who come straight from their countries, they can blend in, that’s why they are hidden. They can find a job easily, but I’m not sure if that’s all good. We have to create support services or some kind of activity, like giving different services for the needs of the students who are international students with a visa, and I think one of the things we have to bring up with CUNY Central is this new change of immigration and how that contributed to CUNY. Foreign students are suffering, financially, especially LaGuardia and Kingsborough we have a very strange system, they have to be here with a six-week session. Before that, as long as they are full-time in the first session, they don’t have to take classes, they don’t have to pay extra, but now, every unique foreign student has to pay. It’s a side thing, but it’s a big issue.
David Cheng: I think that the point about Asian and Asian American students, there’s a big difference, because we look Asian, and people assume you’re a foreigner, or vice versa, and someone who’s American, like William, were you born here?
William Concepcion: I was born in the Philippines.
David Cheng: But you came here when you were five. I think that there’s a different feeling…Kyoko you came in your teens?
Kyoko Toyama: No, 20’s.
David Cheng: In your 20’s? Yeah, so I think people at a different level of acculturation, and different levels of social, social is different. I think when people in international groups, they speak the language of their country, and a native born Asian would feel out of place. You know, the expression banana or bamboo, where it’s yellow on the outside white on the inside, you don’t know what the feeling is. So I think it’s a different set of stressors, and a different way of working with the students.
Liz McCaffrey: No matter what, I really firmly believe in any kind of counseling, I really work from the theory of individual and individual differences, I think that you’re correct, throwing everyone into one pot, I have a nephew who was adopted, but he’s Korean, he was born in Korea, but he was adopted as a baby by my sister and brother in law, who are Mormons. So he’s brought up, talk about a poor confused guy, but truly the world is approaching him as Korean and he’s like a little Mormon guy. Very confused. But you don’t know what people really are until you talk to them and you’re curious about who they are and what their experience is. To assume that how they look in any way describes their experience…you can’t.
David Cheng: Right. That’s where the training for counselors, for multi-counselors training is very important. It goes beyond just being nice, you’re different, you’re special, [inaudible] people are nice, but it still can only take you that far. You need to really know more about how to deal with someone who’s different in terms of culturally. By the same token, like a white counselor with a black counselee, or vice versa.
Liz McCaffrey: I think that it’s a good point too that here in New York, people come to their culture groups in New York and they can stay pretty isolated in their culture groups. The idea that, the statistic was that 90% of our students speak another language at home, really indicates how, I mean when you went to the small town in Pennsylvania you really had no choice.
Kyoko Toyama: We had 250 Japanese students on campus, LaGuardia only.
David Cheng: When I was in undergraduate, there was one other Asian student…I was in Pennsylvania also. The point is, I think that it was so different, I would find it a lot more difficult if I were just thrown into New York, because you’re really not making that transition, that way we really have to learn about American culture, acculturation, but here you can hide, you can just stay in your group.
Janette Alejandra Treue: You’re talking about a Diaspora, but you have trans-nationalism now, in the past you probably weren’t able to go back to your home country as much, you probably didn’t know so much about the United States when you first came here, but now, the internet is an enclave, and you come here and you don’t even speak English and you can get by and even be very successful.
David Cheng: One point I want to bring up is the internet. As you are talking about the referral thing, we just put in a website for faculty, how to make referrals, what symptoms to look for in students to make a referral, and we also have a survey on the Baruch Counseling Center website of the students telling us what are some of the needs in terms of group workshops. It’s surprising that we got some hits; people do respond and say, what are our needs in terms of areas of workshops, and the internet is a good thing. Sometimes, people can be a little more anonymous, like if you have a problem with an eating disorder and you don’t want people to know, they said well, your needs, my interest is eating disorder. If you have that they can check that, and then the counseling center would know, oh we need more workshops or outings in that particular area.
Edward Ma: I was just wondering, what I feel was very important, you have to find something wrong with the students, but the students may seem good, but cannot function in academics adequately. Are there any mandatory for the faculty to interview, to have faculty and student get together, to have one talk or two talks, mandatory, instead of letting them go on their own. So, we try once, and put that talk, and credit, for credit, to discuss, let faculty give a counseling and some credits.
David Cheng: I think what you’re talking about is something like freshman orientation? At freshman orientation, they have students and faculty and a student leader, but the thing is that, no credit. They wouldn’t give credit to freshman orientation, so it’s really nothing, they don’t take it very seriously. In other colleges, too, you usually have an advisor, a faculty advisor, and then he or she would take a number of students, but not in CUNY, not in Baruch, anyway. So the students can really be lost, you don’t have any counselor, who do I go to? Academic advisement or career advisement, or personal problems, no one to talk to. Some of the students are a little bit more assertive, they’ll talk to the professors that they feel comfortable talking with. And that’s where we get most of our referrals very often.
Liz McCaffrey: What I find is an ongoing issue with many of our students is that they really are torn between their two cultures, and I find that to be a developmental issue in the counseling process. They’re torn, they’re torn as far as they’re getting too western for their parents, and they’re actually losing their language so that they can still speak some of their own language but not so well, so they can’t even communicate as well with parents anymore, but they really are losing that piece, and then parents aren’t very happy about that. Of course there’s the old issue with parents dictating, particularly these first generation in college, the parents dictating what these students should become when they don’t want to become it at all. It’s a very big issue I see with our students, and certainly our Asian students, that they’re doing accounting, doing computer science, doing these things and they really can’t stand it. And they’re not doing well, and if they’re not doing well it’s usually because they’re not doing well with that major.
Janette Alejandra Treue: It’s interesting for your study to see whether they’re coping in terms of cultural conflict they have with their family, with their identity. This would be a qualitative study to see, how are they functioning, how are they doing, are they choosing their parents’ culture, or are they [inaudible].
Kyoko Toyama: It’s so complicated, I used to feel this way when I saw some students who [inaudible] grades to their counselors and we were trying to recruit, but we forget sometimes that students’ immediate needs could be financial. If they have to take the bulk of the financial responsibility, [inaudible], they may have a conflict with the parent or parent’s expectations, becoming an engineer, but if whatever they choose generates money just for now, I’ll just say to the student, we just have to make some changes in counseling techniques, I’d tell the student, you are good in this, but I understand this is what you may have to do, and if you make your family happy, because sometimes students feel happy if they make their family happy, so we have to do a lot of talk in between, but I just plant a seed.
Liz McCaffrey: I usually try to come up with a compromise position, where they get a little bit of what they want. I had a student from Taiwan, he was in pre-med, very bad and couldn’t stand it, but he was really an artist, but art was not going to be acceptable at all. What we finally came to is that he did become an architect, so that he got to be in an acceptable profession for the family and have some of the creative peace that he wanted. That was such a great success for me in particular, but they normally don’t work out quite so beautifully. But it was a great compromise for him.
David Cheng: I think throughout the years, I worked in the field there are certain recurring themes and issues, like family issues, shame and face, saving face, what you just mentioned about being what you want to be, but these are changing, though. That’s why we need to do something now. Because it’s like taking the pulse again, like blood pressure, it changes. I think the way society, the whole culture, you know pop culture and things like that, the pulse is changing. The students are not the stereotypical Asians, you know, Asians are the model minority and all these things, but they change. It’s like, they’re like kids nowadays, they all want to be rappers, and dress, and the whole values also change. So we need to constantly go back and take the pulse again to see, what is it now. I think it’s so important that we need to find some systematic way of measuring or understanding what’s going on, or what are the new needs now. It’s just like the marriage thing, I think it’s been the last few years, because of Indian students, because many of them have arranged marriages, and when they mention that the counselor is shocked, because he’s never heard of it.
Liz McCaffrey: But a lot of students are okay with that.
Jannette Alejandra Treue: In the workshops the majority of the students were totally for it. They were explaining to us how important it is to be in an arranged marriage as opposed to a love marriage, something with their culture and their parents, it’s the right way.
David Cheng: I think the Jewish culture, too? The [Shadakh]? They make a match?
[Julia Goldfarb]: But there’s a choice that they don’t have to accept, necessarily, the first person they suggest. A lot of people don’t think they have a choice, but they do have a choice.
Edward Ma: [inaudible] support system, I was a student at University of Connecticut, when I came here, so many years of English, when I came here at first I couldn’t even order a hamburger. English [inaudible], so, in order to survive, my social skills not bad, so I telephoned several students about homework, so I called one, two, three, to affirm, and I think CUNY and Queens College, law school, there’s a system; I wish I could have had that. 15 students as a team, they work together, study groups, all this together, so it’s easy for the faculty to get in touch, and be more connected with each other, with the group. 15 members [inaudible] I wish I could have that. That solves a lot of emotional, friendship, isolation, loneliness, a lot of academic, health, this is so important. [inaudible]
David Cheng: I think we have to wrap up, it’s 11:30. Burning questions, okay.
Kyoko Toyama: Over the years, I start with what I learned in grad school, and I test it out, and no it doesn’t work. Here I am, I’m changing. One of the things, is, again, the gender issue, as a woman I try to live right, [inaudible] Asian women, they’re sort of torn between. But again, it’s not my judgment. That’s where I am, in the beginning I was gung ho, women can have a choice and opportunity, but I think they are okay with some of the things, and if we change that, it’ll create more problems. But my issue with the gender, it is something we should definitely do more research on, and my dissertation is also the interdependence and independence, and a lot of women really, acculturate, functionally, but internally they don’t change. So I think I would like AAARI to do more research on gender issues among Asians, and different ethnic groups, not pulling everyone together as Asian women.
David Cheng: Acculturate functionally, not emotionally.
Kyoko Toyama: it has to do with how old they were when they came to this country too. The other one, I’m not really versed in that, I had a few Japanese women who had difficulty coming up, but they did, and what I did was to hook those students up with alumni, some of the students are very active in LaGuardia, and are very open, gay women, I needed some help in really helping the students, and I used the alumni to come back and speak with students about issues of sexuality, alumni, so I don’t know what the colleges are doing.
David Cheng: You used the alumni to come talk about sexuality?
Kyoko Toyama: Not that simple. But yeah, they’re experienced.
David Cheng: These are gay, lesbian?
Kyoko Toyama: These are gay, lesbian, women and men who didn’t really talk about it when they were in Japan, but here, they were able.
David Cheng: Yeah, lesbian alumni of that particular cultural group.
Liz McCaffrey: I think that in any of these choices, and you were saying before sometimes they’re okay in making the family happy is a good choice, I think with so many of these issues making such a trade-off, because for so many students that I see, if they go the way they think they want to go, they lose so much, they lose those family connections, they lose that whole support system of the culture.
David Cheng: So what’s your burning issue?
Liz McCaffrey: My burning issue is, I guess my burning issue is helping students being really able to maybe look at where students need to keep their culture, too. Even in acculturating, in some way look at the connection that they need to keep back with culture.
Jannette Alejandra Treue: To explore their ethnic identity?
Liz McCaffrey: Right, so it’s not all about the issue of becoming [inaudible], that they’ve lost. [inaudible], but then it exercises personal freedom
Kyoko Toyama: I have two students who became pregnant [inaudible], without parents watching them.
Edward Ma: [inaudible], she said, if you’re not a good Chinese speaker, you’ll never be a good American, you can never be a good American if you are not a good Chinese speaker.
David Cheng: Burning issue. What’s yours?
Jannette Alejandra Treue: I guess it would be the separation of the countries, and looking at the ethnicity, you’re kind of studying them to find out which country is not a homogeneous group. But also the age they came here, that they came here voluntarily, or they came with family, if they really want to go back to their home country, there are so many variables that I don’t really have one burning issue, there’s just so much to explore.
David Cheng: I think also acculturation.
Kyoko Toyama: I’m so glad to see people. I have never met you in person, and I think it’s especially as a counseling director, and you go to some of the meetings too, we lost this sort of connection, horizontal connection when we lost [inaudible], now we don’t know who is [inaudible].
David Cheng: Before you guys go, I want all your numbers and email addresses, so we can keep up. Arthur, you have your burning question?
Arthur Downing: Mine has to do with, those of us who are in service positions, [inaudible].
David Cheng: The link of the services, specifically the library, right?
Arthur Downing: Well, that’s part of it, there’s also the computing center, there’s avoidance as well.
Liz McCaffrey: Maybe we’re talking about a whole other, besides surveying our students, maybe what we should also be surveying is our faculty and our staff, to see how they might respond to their issues as far as different cultures go. And those stereotypes and everything else.
David Cheng: In general, or Asian and Asian American faculty and staff?
Liz McCaffrey: In general, faculty and staff, because you’re right, we’re talking about student issues, but Arthur is talking about students facing faculty and staff that are.
David Cheng: I think they bring up a lot of stuff like racism, stereotyping, the whole cultural thing, ignorance, indifference. Right, faculty have training. I’ve done that multi-cultural training for faculty and staff.
Kyoko Toyama: Arthur can be the moderator, they’ll be like oh, the counselor’s gonna train us.
Female Speaker: [inaudible], people that don’t really need it.
David Cheng: When you open voluntarily, the same people go to the same training, and that’s why you need to have the administrator or chairman, and require them. The only successful multicultural training was at a provost, and all the chairs had to send a representative of the department, and they had no choice but to do it.
Grace Lu: My name is Grace Lu, University Coordinator of Student Health Services for CUNY Central, and unfortunately I don’t have direct contact with students, so I guess my burning issue is what you raised and how I can take it back to my office and talk to Vice Chancellor Hill, what I can do in health services.
David Cheng: William, you want to tell them who you are?
William Concepcion: My name is William Concepcion, and I’m an intern at the counseling center for Baruch College.
Julia Goldfarb: I’m Julia Goldfarb, I’m a student and I’m doing my externship at Baruch College Counseling Center
James [Huang]: I’m James [Huang], and I’m an administrative assistant.
Bill Tan: I’m Bill and I’m helping with the recording.
