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sandvvich · 4 years

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I hope you don't mind if I go on a "quick" family rant...

I'm up right now after a bad reflux fit and thinking about what my dad said yesterday. I was discussing with my brother how high school wake up times are crazy for young people (discussing since he's in high school). And my dad comes by and says something along the lines of "says the lazy jobless person who gets up at noon every day" (edited a bit to remove a blatant yet specific jab at my character and misgendering)

Um, we are in a major recession caused by a virus and he was the one emphasizing that I couldn't go back to retail for months and months because how dare I work and potentially make him or my mom sick, as their income is a lot more important. Now my old job is full due to the hiring done in response to covid and its no longer an option. Others in the area declined me and the bus is crazy expensive, so not really able to justify borrowing bus money for a job that won't pay me well enough to pay my parents for the bus back immediately and thus end up paying them for a long time for what should have been like 50 dollars in their warped view of what should be owed to them (a bit vague, but something similar has happened before)

So that leaves stuff in my field, which I've been doing personal projects for for a while now as well as sending out applications. Even with a CS degree, coming out with no experience into a virus- caused recession economy made December 2019 the worst time ever to graduate for reasons that I could not have predicted beforehand.

I also don't wake up at noon everyday; I'm usually awake by 9-10 (earlier on mornings like today where I have something just waking me up at various times throughout the night) and just do various things before getting up. Like, he seriously thinks I just sleep through when the kids come down at like 10 on days they have off with blaring music to shoot in the basement room immediately next to me that they retrofitted for hockey (against my wishes, mind you). But this is the person whose preferred wake time is 5:30 on days he's not taking kids to hockey before then.

Enough justifying though, as this is the same family who believes it's perfectly healthy for these kids to go to hockey before school, often getting them up around 4 several times a week, which is especially cruel for the kid that doesn't even like doing it (they say it's for the exercise sake, but doing something for the exercise shouldn't be the same routine as with the kid who hopes this to be his career in the future). Not to justify the behavior, but I can't really debate the ethics of something like that with someone who will easily make low jabs and is so incredibly biased.

#family problems #family #trans #transsexual #transmed #rant #insane #insane parents

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inspiruseducation · 4 years

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Covid -19 on International Campus: Student Perspective

We got in touch with some Inspirus alumni across the world to understand the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on their academic and career plans. While universities are as helpless as the students are in the face of such a situation, they have been helping out students wherever they can. The transition to teaching online was very smooth for the universities, as expected. They also were very proactive in communicating and enforcing governmental regulations in terms of social distancing, travel and international student visa status, while also providing much-needed psychological support to international students.

Newcastle University, in the UK, is even helping international students financially, according to Riddhi Shah, a current MSc in Foundations of Clinical Psychology student. She had the option to go home but chose to stay in Newcastle. In mainland Europe, Shriya Mahamuni is pursuing an MSc in Human Settlements from KU Leuven in Belgium. Like Riddhi in the UK, she, unfortunately, has to live with the fact that half her degree will be online. Shriya’s program has a major interactive component in terms of group projects, site visits, and guest lectures - all of which are not possible currently.

Across the Atlantic, Chirag Kamble is currently in the 2nd semester of his MS in CS program at Stevens Institute of Technology located in Hoboken, New Jersey - a stone’s throw away from New York City, which has been among the worst-affected cities in the world. He was especially happy with how Stevens made sure that international students did not have to worry about their visa status at all. However, he’s worried about the impact of the pandemic on summer internships. His friends’ internships have been put on hold or canceled, and he is finding it difficult to secure one for himself. Trena Dhingra, who is pursuing her MS in CS at Northeastern University, Boston, decided not to travel to India in spite of having the option to because she was worried about the possibility of facing issues re-entering the US. Her university has given students who are not coping up with the online mode of lectures to be able to choose whether they want the current semester’s classes to be considered towards their degrees even after the final exams.

Pranita Vashisht, an Engineering Management graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, sums up all current MS students’ responses to the big question: is it worth taking a semester online? She says it is better to defer by a semester or even a year to get the actual benefits of on-campus learning. Mahi Juthani, who is pursuing her BS at the University of Texas at Austin, grabbed the opportunity to fly home and pursue the rest of the semester online. However, she misses the interactive aspect of on-campus learning and joins Pranita in recommending deferring by a semester to get the full international education experience - provided the time off is utilized for something productive.

Your circumstances determine whether this is the right time for you to proceed with your international education experience. For undergraduate students, taking 1 of the total 8 semesters online is still fine. However, for postgraduate students, given that they generally finish their Master’s program in 2/3/4 semesters, it is not ideal to take 1 semester online. So now is a good time to ask your university about the deferral process. Until you hear something officially from YOUR university, prepare to enter your program in August. The economy is on a downward trajectory currently so it is actually the best time to increase your qualifications - that’s what a huge number of people did in the Great Recession of the late 2000s. Even the worst-case projections currently do not expect this situation to continue beyond 2020. You will hence be entering the job market when the economy has healed, with a great chance of landing the high-paying jobs that you aspire.

As always, your mentors and counselors at Inspirus are just a phone call away in case you have any further questions. We hope you and your family around the world stay safe during these testing times.

Team Inspirus

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usnewsaggregator-blog · 7 years

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The Brother-Sister Divide

New Post has been published on https://usnewsaggregator.com/the-brother-sister-divide/

The Brother-Sister Divide

MERCED, California—Nita Vue’s parents, refugees from Laos, wanted all nine of their children go to college. But Nita, now 20, is the only one of her brothers and sisters who is going to get a degree. A few of her sisters began college, and one nearly completed nursing school, she told me. Her brothers were less interested. “The way I grew up, the girls were more into schooling,” she said. “Women tended to have higher expectations than men did.”

This is not unusual. Across socioeconomic classes, women are increasingly enrolling and completing postsecondary education, while, even as opportunities for people without a college education shrink, men’s rates of graduation remain relatively stagnant. In 2015, the most recent year for which data is available, 72.5 percent of females who had recently graduated high school were enrolled in a two-year or four-year college, compared to 65.8 percent of men. That’s a big difference from 1967, when 57 percent of recent male high-school grads were in college, compared to 47.2 percent of women.

Women from low-income and minority families especially have made great strides in recent decades. Just 12.4 percent of men from low-income families who were high-school sophomores in 2002 had received a bachelor’s degree by 2013, compared to 17.6 percent of women. And in 2016, 22 percent of Hispanic women ages 25 to 29 had a bachelor’s degree, compared to 16 percent of Hispanic men.

(While poor women are outpacing poor men, it is important to note that in the big picture, poor women are nevertheless far behind their richer counterparts. About 70 percent of women from a high socioeconomic status who were high school sophomores in 2002 had gotten bachelor’s degrees by 2013, compared to 17.6 percent of women from low socioeconomic status.)

This gender gap in college completion has been a long time in the making. In the early 1900s, when some elite colleges started opening up to women, women quickly got better grades than men, according to Claudia Buchmann, a professor of sociology at Ohio State and the co-author of The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What it Means for American Schools. In the 1970s, as more women started attending college, they started graduating at higher and higher rates, while men’s enrollment and graduation rates remained relatively flat. But until recently, the women attending college were mostly from elite families. Now, women from lower-income families are increasingly attending college.

Percentage of American 25-to-29-Year-Olds With a Bachelor’s Degree or Higher

Steven Johnson / The Atlantic

This is a positive development for women, because a college education is increasingly important in today’s economy. Out of the 11.6 million jobs created after the recession, 8.4 million of those went to those with at least a bachelor’s degree, according to the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown. But while women across socioeconomic classes are embracing the idea that education is important and are pursuing postsecondary degrees, many men from lower-income households are not. “The puzzle is—why don’t boys get it? There’s all this talk that we hear constantly, about the benefits of a college degree,” said Buchmann.

Some of the problem is that boys from low-income families appear to struggle more in school than girls do. They lag behind as early as kindergarten even though health tests show that, at the time of birth, they are just as healthy and cognitively able to learn as their sisters, a recent paper found. This is partly because they appear to be more affected by poverty and stress than girls are. “Boys are differentially sensitive to negative environments in general,” one of the paper’s authors, Northwestern professor David Figlio, told me. These findings dovetail with much-cited research out of the Equality of Opportunity Project that finds that childhood disadvantage is especially harmful for boys.

School quality is also more important for boys than for girls, Figlio said, and since many low-income families attend poor-quality schools, their sons, who are already lagging behind their daughters, fall even further behind. The paper found that lower-income boys often do worse in elementary and middle school than their sisters, and have more behavioral problems, which can lead them to disengage with school entirely or get kicked out.

Nita Vue told me she was always set on college, even when she was in grade school. Neither of her parents has a college education, and neither has worked recently, but they encouraged all of their children to focus on school. Nita, who is now a junior at the University of California-Merced, would come home from school and read while her siblings were listening to music. She always had good grades, and graduated from high school with a 4.0 grade point average. In general, her sisters did better academically than her brothers did, her mother, Mai Kao Vue, told me. “The girls were more into schooling, and the boys were more outgoing,” she said.

What is it about girls? The differences start young: Girls enter kindergarten more prepared than boys, and derive more satisfaction from pleasing parents and teachers than boys do, according to Buchmann. In one study, 62 percent of eighth-grade girls said that good grades were “very important,” compared to 50 percent of boys, according to Buchmann and her co-author Thomas DiPrete. Girls also have more of the social and behavioral skills that are important for succeeding in school from an early age, Buchmann said.

Boys often feel pressured to act “masculine,” which can lead them to eschew school —one study showed that boys put a lot of effort into school are often labeled as “gay” or “pussies.” Yet boys who don’t buy into those stereotypes and participate in music, dance, or art, do better than other boys academically in eighth grade, according to Buchmann and DiPrete. Those different levels of engagement can make a difference for college attendance: students who reported getting mostly As in middle school have a 70 percent chance of completing college by age 25, while those who get mostly Cs have only a 10 percent chance.

How parents raise children can exacerbate these dynamics. Pressures to be “masculine” are often stronger in lower-income or working-class families, Buchmann says. “The notion of what it means to be a boy and a man, especially among lower working-class boys, makes it such that they see doing well in school as something that girls and women do, and they don’t want any part of it,” Buchmann told me. This is especially true if boys see male role models like fathers or older family members working physical, blue-collar jobs that don’t require an education. They may assume that they’ll be able to work those jobs too, even if they’re disappearing, and think that doing anything else is too “girly.” By contrast, if boys have role models that are educated, they do better in school. Better-educated parents often teach their children a different concept of masculinity in which academic achievement is important. Moreover, they are more likely to know men in careers that require an education, and to have those men as their role models.

Percentage of Black and Hispanic American 25-to-29-Year-Olds With a Bachelor’s Degree or Higher, by Gender

Steven Johnson / The Atlantic

Nita’s brother, Por Vue, who is now 28, told me he thought he was deeply affected by his family’s lack of knowledge about the educational system. He actually applied to and was accepted into Cal State Monterey Bay, but his parents advised him to instead go to a junior college closer to home, he told me. But the junior college was overcrowded and he couldn’t get into many of the classes he wanted, so had to change his major. Then, while he was in college, he started a family, and later dropped out so he could support his wife and kids. He’s now a manager at PetSmart, where he makes around $13 an hour. “I think if I’d had a better family background, I would have had knowledge that other people had, and I would have been able to go further,” he told me.

Boys may also be more susceptible to short-term instant gratification than girls are, Buchmann told me. Boys may have a harder time slogging away at a college degree and paying for it when they know there are jobs available where they could get paid a decent wage, even if that job might not be a long-term proposition. I talked to a 31-year-old in Merced named Edward Vasquez who was one-and-a-half years into a two-year nursing program when he dropped out to take a job as a certified nursing assistant that paid $17.50 an hour. He’s since lost his job and is looking for work.

This is not to say that men can’t succeed if they don’t have a college education. I talked to a woman named Olga Jimenez who was raised by a single mother, and who went to college when her brothers didn’t. But her brother has still made a good career as a real-estate agent, and has a license and his own office, she told me. Meanwhile, Olga had to work three jobs at once while she attended Whittier College and is still paying off her college debt.

Yet Jimenez’s brother is the exception, not the rule. People with just a high-school diploma make, on average, $692 a week, compared to $1,156 for those with a bachelor’s degree. And the returns of a college education have grown over time. People with a bachelor’s degree or higher earn 14 percent more than they did in 1979, on average, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics; people with a high school degree earn 12 percent less.

As the gender gap grows, there are wider implications for society. People are more likely to pair with others who have a similar educational background; as more women get postsecondary degrees than men, women will increasingly find their marriage prospects dimming. This is already happening in some areas of the country—I wrote in May about a town in Ohio where the women complained that all the men were on drugs or unemployed, while the women held down steady jobs. Their daughters will face a similar future, unless they can get their sons to succeed at—and care about—school.

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payment-providers · 7 years

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New Post has been published on Payment-Providers.com

New Post has been published on https://payment-providers.com/saudi-entrepreneur-on-ecommerce-in-the-middle-east/

Saudi Entrepreneur on Ecommerce in the Middle East

In the United States, ecommerce is mature and sophisticated. That is not the case in Saudi Arabia, where it’s new and challenging. Hamza el Bayed is co-founder of a Jeddah, Saudi Arabia ecommerce company called Ora La Moda, which sells fashion apparel.

I recently spoke with him about the hurdles — and the opportunities — in launching an ecommerce company in the Middle East. What follows is the full audio interview and the transcript of it, edited for length and clarity.

Practical Ecommerce: What is the state of ecommerce in Saudi Arabia?

Hamza el Bayed: Ecommerce in Saudi Arabia is fairly new. The mentality of the Middle East with ecommerce, in general, is a bit different than Europe and the States. It’s something very new here, and people are still struggling with the concept of purchasing online. But it’s getting there.

PEC: Tell us about Ora La Moda, the company you’ve launched?

Bayed: I started with the concept of starting an online business with my wife in late 2015. We studied the market on what was the best product or service we can provide to the Middle East. We came up with fashion and accessories. It also doesn’t require so many licenses, and it doesn’t require a huge warehouse.

We found a couple of similar companies already out there. They’re quite large, so our market share would be fairly small. The competitors were much stronger than us. Rather than becoming a reseller for major brands, we decided to become our own brand, concentrating on quality. We didn’t just try to make a quick buck.

It took us about six months to set up the entire concept from design, to colors, logo, and a company name. It wasn’t very easy, but I believe we did a good job.

Our target segment is over 25 years old. These are the people who have jobs, who have credit cards, who can afford to pay for quality. The younger generation, especially here in Saudi Arabia, prefer to go out rather than shop online. Shopping is basically their outlet.

PEC: So you sell primarily female fashion accessories?

Bayed: At the moment, yes. We didn’t have much capital to start with, so we divided our launch into four different categories. If we can win the trust of the female segment in the Middle East, then we can grow into different sectors. After the female section, we can expand into infants, children, men, and start building up our catalog.

PEC: You speak very good English. How did that come to be?

Bayed: I lived in England for approximately 10 years. I went at a very young age, I think when I was 11, and I came back I think in 2006.

PEC: What are some obstacles to running an ecommerce business in the Middle East?

Bayed: From the time I spent in England, I learned so much on how I can set up this type of business. Here in Saudi Arabia, or in the Middle East in general, people expect a company that has lots of capital.

In Europe or in the States, a person can start from his garage and build up a business until it becomes, basically, a giant. That was a big challenge for us, on the limited funding that we had, to give our word saying that we’re trustworthy. This is one of the struggles that we are facing now, because we are a very small establishment.

So we started tackling these points, saying, okay, I have Norton Symantec on my site saying I am verified. Aramex, our shipping agency, is one of the leading shipping agencies in the Middle East, and they’re very trustworthy.

PEC: Many merchants in the United States use hosted platforms. But you use CS-Cart, licensed software.

Bayed: We have our own server that we are renting. We looked into many different platforms to use. We wanted something that we can edit, we can change, we can add on to, and that can be more flexible for our needs and, of course, multilingual. We had many different platforms, but with CS-Cart we found the flexibility that we need.

PEC: Where do you go for development help?

Bayed: We have two different companies that we work with. For issues specific to CS-Cart, we use Simtech Development, in Russia.

PEC: How did you learn your business skills?

Bayed: I majored in business administration, and I continued into master’s and doctorate studies. My father is a businessman and his father was a businessman. It runs in the blood, basically.

PEC: How do you manage shipping, payments, and inventory in Saudi Arabia?

Bayed: We have two different payment methods: cash on delivery and credit cards. With credit card payments, we went with two different companies, PayPal and 2Checkout. Both are based in the States.

Our main payment method is cash on delivery. With Aramex, when they deliver the item or the box to the customer, they collect the payment. They take a small fee, and then, at the end of the month, they wire transfer the remaining amount to us. Most of my sales, I think it’s about 80 percent, is cash on delivery.

PEC: Where are your customers located?

Bayed: At the moment, we’re only in the Middle East. We started to grow very recently to Europe and the States, because we are in a bit of a recession in Saudi Arabia.

There are a few countries that we cannot ship to, due to the law in Saudi Arabia. Some other countries, it’s a hassle or they’re very expensive to ship to.

PEC: Anything else?

Bayed: To anyone who wish to start a business, ecommerce is one of the easiest ways and it doesn’t require a lot of money to set up. If you know how to set it up, it’s fairly straightforward. You can start from as little as $50 and grow from that. Just know your market and what the people you want to sell to need. You can make a successful company out of it.

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