The Foreign Colony In Caltech`s Department of Electrical Engineering

Below, Paul Nachman suggests that readers cast their  eyes “on the graduate-student roster for Caltech`s Department of Electrical Engineering”. I did this, and I note, using the patented “what kind of name is that” stereotyping technique, that less than one fifth of the class has a name you would have found in an engineering class in America in 1960.

Diversity wasn`t totally absent from American at that point—any one of the foreign names might have been studying engineering in an American school at any time. I. M. Pei, a native of Shanghai, was studying architecture in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts in 1935.

But he would have been the only one—a member of a minority group. He would have been surrounded, in fact, by Americans. At Caltech, it`s the Americans who are surrounded. 

The names below are so weird that “Carlos Roberto Gonzalez” seems like a breath of air from home. 

1.  Behrooz Abiri


2. Ahmed Akgiray


3. Ron Appel


4. Aristotelis Asimakopoulou


5. Hamad Hamze Bajgiran


6. Roy Blankman


7. Subhonmesh Bose


8. Steven Bowers


9. Michael Burd


10. Wuhan Desmond Cai


11. Chieh-feng Chang


12. Han-Chieh Chang


13. Samson Chen


14. Kaushik Dasgupta


15. Theodoros Dikaliotis


16. Ran Duan


17. David Foor


18. William Frankland


19. Qiurui Fu (Amy)


20. Eyal En Gad


21. Vikash Gunreddy


22. Masoud Asanjan Farivar


23. Lingwen Gan


24. Carlos Roberto Gonzalez


25. Wael Halbawi


26. David Hall


27. Chao Han


28. Shuo Han


29. Andrew Homyk


30. Yu Horie


31. Roarke Horstmeyer


32. Kun Huang (Ms.)


33. Wentao Huang


34. Kishore Jaganathan


35. Mooseok Jang


36. Dongyang Kang


37. Jinho Kim


38. Seyoon Kim


39. Vinayak Ramya Korlakai


40. Seung Ah Lee


41. Yi-Shan Lee


42. Derek Leong


43. Chih-Hao Liu


44. Hsi-Chun Liu


45. Yang Liu


46. Zhao Liu


47. Ji Luo (Ms.)


48. Matthew Loh


49. Jordan Maslov


50. Imran Malik


51. Wei Mao


52. Manuel Monge


53. Abhirman Moturi


54. Muhammad Mujeeb-U-Rahman


55. Jayakrishnan Nair


56. Mandheerej Nandra


57. Meisam Honarvar Nazari


58. Parham Noorzad


59. Samet Oymak


60. Alex Pai


61. Akshay Pai


62. Piya Pal


63. Shuo (Sean) Pang


64. Qiuyu Peng


65. Yamuna Phal (Ms.)


66. Mayank Raj


67. Aditya Rajagopal


68. Jian Ren


69. Damon Russell


70. Saman Saeedi


71. Amirreza Safaripour


72. Christos Santis


73. Penvipha Satsanarukkit


74. Nicholas Scianmarello


75. Jacob Sendowski


76. Krishna Settaluri


77. Constantine Sideris


78. Scott Steger


79. Ravi Teja Sukhavasi


80. Albert Tan


81. Srikanth Venkata Tenneti


82. Matthew Thill


83. Christos Thrampoulidis


84. Brian Thompson


85. Zhiying Wang


86. Kelsey Whitesell


87. Ming Fai Wong


88. Hao Wu


89. Changhong Zhao


90. Guoan Zheng


91. Haojiang (Edward) Zhou


92. Sinan Zhao


93. Yu Zhao


94. Guoan Zheng


95. He Zhao (Ms.)


96. Hongchao Zhou