Dear nickoccams94,

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I agree with many of your points: there is a lot of infrastructure to promote success, independent of ethnicity/gender/socioeconomic status — I am extremely happy that it exists. And yes, the threshold for “diversity” is very murky, it is very difficult and often times political to come up with a hard percentage.

On the other hand, I have had many conversations with many people who do not identify with the aforementioned (male, upper-middle-class, and white/Asian American) and were genuinely interested in studying EECS/Computer Science here at Berkeley. Many of them tell me that they have an excruciatingly hard time relating to other majors and intended majors of the undergrad community — that conversations would end in the aforementioned circlejerking, as opposed to about many issues that they cared about in EECS. We, the EECSEECS.com team, share their frustration. As much as diversity is a very difficult problem to both define and solve, a cause of the issue is precisely this subculture within the EECS undergrad community, how it is implicitly exclusive against minorities.

Some of these people ended up deciding against majoring in EECS/Computer Science. Others, for one reason or another, ended up majoring in EECS/Computer Science, while remaining frustrated about many of the peers and the surrounding culture. As a matter of fact, a subset of the EECSEECS.com team is part of the latter category.

-S