The University of Hawaii Manoa

Date: Nov 02 2005
Major: English (This Major's Salary over time)
The school has its negatives and positives. I got the sense that many "open minded" haoles have a very difficult time with the cultural shock of being in Hawai'i. There is a great lack of respect for "locals," which is an understandable prejudice of typical yuppie mainland haole "open minded" people. Folks in Hawai'i are very down to Earth, rich in spirit—not in intellectual pursuits. The atmosphere in Hawai'i is at times very anti-intellectual and there is much racism against especially white people. There are very few black students at the university but let's be honest- black people have no history in Hawai'i: there was no slavery here and the military families kids generally go to school on the mainland. The cultural diversity is remarkable though, having three other Chinese students in class with me (studing English literature) out of a class of 19 was surprising and the number of languages spoken on this campus rival any school in not the nation but the world. In the University you can study Maori, Tahitian, Hawai'ian, Samoan, Tongan, Ilicano, Tagalog, Indonesian, Hakka, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Japanese, Hindi, Sanskrit, Thai, Vietnamese, Burmese, Cambodian, Tibetan, Mongolian, Arabic… you get the point I'm sure. You are not pushed here- this is not a place where lazy people will get anything out of being here, they will graduate easily however maybe. You get what you put in here.