He went on a scholarship. I assumed it was an academic scholarship.
I wonder if Punahou had any Foreign Student Programs when Obama attended?
He went on a scholarship. I assumed it was an academic scholarship.
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Anyone know the answer to this?
” He went on a scholarship. I assumed it was an academic scholarship. “
One of things in Dreams that Barry wrote about was his lousy academic record.
His mother confronts him “at the start of my senior year “( Pge 94 ) about his slipping grades , his lack of ambition and his drug associates.
His best friend Pablo had just been arrested for possession.
Barry or “ Bar “ as he said his family called him , quotes his mother as saying
“ You haven’t even started on your college applications.” Pge 95
She’s very upset at his poor attitude and he says maybe I’ll just be a bum and hang around.
She says he could get into any college in the US “ if he just put in a little effort.”
So , at the beginning of his senior year-he has poor grades, a lousy attitude, no ambition, runs with drug addicts and uses street drugs himself and no college applications begun.
Not the stuff of academic scholarships it would seem.
On page 96 Bar wrote that he “ graduated without mishap.”
And that he was “ accepted into several respectable schools ( unnamed, naturally ) ,but, that he “settled on Occidental College in Los Angeles
because I’d met a girl from Brentwood vacationing with her family in Hawaii. “
A non sequitur because he never speaks of the girl again or how she motivated him to apply to Occidental.
He then adds that he was “ still going through the motions “ and was as “ indifferent towards college as he was to everything else.”
My impression after looking at the evidence Barry provided in his book ,
is that his grades and attitude precluded acceptance at most American colleges.
The foreign student program at Occidental may have been the only route for him
and the one his family gamed , maybe out of desperation.
His lousy attitude makes me think that Mom or grandma filed out his applications since he could care less during most of his high school years,
especially all during his senior year .
And since he was coming in as a foreign student-no campus visit or interview was required.
Another aspect of his life as a college student were his friends-in the beginning, Muslim foreign exchange students from Karachi, Pakistan.
Not American students or black students or basketball players or fellow Hawaiians.
So, he must have been housed in an area with other foreign students.
Eventually, he also gravitated to the college Marxists.