Web Magazine Online

Previous | Web Magazine | Next

By Anh Tien Tran My Interview with Jennifer Joe Jennifer Joe is a studious 4th year economics student who comes from San Francisco. With an economics degree she hopes to get a job in a finance or marketing company, which will then eventually take her to graduate school where she can get her MBA. Jennifer has been busy preparing herself for the future in the business world by joining the accounting society last year, but because of her drive for excellence in school she spends less time with the club this year and more on her education. She also found by taking some accounting classes that accounting was not exactly her "cup of tea" and that she wanted to focus more towards the field of marketing. When I asked her why she explained, "At first I tried to minor in accounting because I thought it was going to be interesting, but then I found out that it wasn't right for me. So, now my biggest focus is marketing because I find it so interesting," Though, she is not fully involved in any particular club right now, Jennifer hopes to find some organization or club on or off campus that can help her out in her career choice. I asked Jennifer a couple of questions on race relations in the U.S. and at UCLA and she had some really good answers. Jennifer believes that the race relations at UCLA are about the same as it is across the U.S. She looks at the U.S. and everywhere she goes she can see people of the same ethnicity sticking together, she believes the same situation exists here at UCLA. "I walk around campus and it's just like everywhere else. People like to stick with people of their background. I walk up and down Bruin Walk and I can tell which is the Chinese clique, the Persian clique, the Black clique, and this is the same all across campus," Jennifer says. A prime example Jennifer believes that illustrates the race relations at UCLA is last year when Prop. 209 was around. "Last year Prop. 209 brought out a lot of tension. Even though it united groups like Blacks, Lesbians and Hispanics, it seemed like all the groups were fighting against Whites and to some degree Asians." To Jennifer she feels that people seem to feel more comfortable with people of the same ethnic background because they usually have a lot of things in common. To alleviate some of the racial tensions at UCLA, Jennifer thinks that we should have more classes like ours, where you bring different ethnic groups together to have intellectual discourse. " In a just Asian American Studies Class or a just African American Studies calls, you don't have any mixture, like the way you do in our class," she says. "I don't think that I'm doing anything really to increase the number of classes like ours," Jennifer says after I asked her what she could do in terms of her suggestion. However, she realized that by just taking these classes is a way to suggest to the school that the class is popular and definitely worth taking. She doesn't feel that individually she make these changes happen, but if a club or class got together and tried to increase these types of classes there would be a greater chance of success. (Anh Tran is a Senior majoring in Asian American Studies.)