Stereotype Threat

04-24-15

Age

I can remember a time in high school where I felt Steriotype threat and I believe impacted the way I pursued something. In high school, I enjoyed playing baseball and so naturally, I joined the baseball team. Now, I am Korean. Back in the 90's, there weren't many korean baseball players in Major League Baseball. I believe the only one was Chan Ho Park of the Los Angeles Dodgers. He literally started the year I joined the high school team. The other piece of releveant information is that I had recently moved into a neighborhood that was predominantly white. I went from living in Queens, NY which many say is the melting pot of New York, to living in a city in Westchester County in New York that consisted mainly of whites. There was literally only one black kid in the school and maybe a handful of other asians.

So here is this new asian kid that shows up to tryouts and wants to try out to be a pitcher. Obviously, the pressure was on. I remember throwing just a few pitches and after seeing the coaches face, I told him nevermind, I'm OK with playing right field. Arguably an area with the least amount of balls coming your way. I still played on the team, but somehow remained "invisible". I felt that had the coach pushed me to try more pitches, I could have been a pitcher for the team.

Today, being part of DBC, I don't have that particular stereotype threat. Just the fact that their is a large asian community in web and software development takes that threat out of the picture. However, I am now in my mid 30's. The average age in the industry is somwhere in the mid 20's. This makes me think thoughts of being inadequate to learn the needed skills to keep up. Has my brain aged too much to not be able to learn as fast. Can an old dog learn new tricks? When I was doing the required reading this week in Sandi Metz's Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby, I constantly got frustrated with myself because some of the concepts didn't instantly become part of my knowledge pool. This brought on thoughts of how my old brain isn't fast enough anymore to learn this. I hope that this is not the case and that I will learn these concepts better if presented to me in a way I can grasp it better in the coming weeks.