Densho Digital Repository - A. Hirotoshi Nishikawa Interview (Densho ID: ddr-phljacl-1-25-13)

[Correct spelling of certain names, words and terms used in this interview have not been verified.]

<Begin Segment 13>

LG: Well, let's talk about college then. So where did you go to college?

AN: Well, because of my interest in chemistry, my chemistry high school teacher encouraged me to go to Berkeley, and I did. My mother and father, because of the life circumstances, didn't even finish high school. So going to Berkeley was something totally out of their sphere of influence. Likewise, studying chemistry, studying science was something totally foreign to them. So my high school chemistry teacher became my first mentor de facto in giving me the encouragement and so on. And I went to Berkeley. Going from a high school of only 120 students in the graduating class to a Berkeley undergraduate class like forty five hundred, five thousand students, was an incredible shift. It was daunting. Also, Berkeley had a lot of smart students. Even though in the state of California, you can go from high school to the California university campus, based on your grade school record, then they didn't have any SATs or anything like that. Well, what I discovered was that the high schools in California varied all over the map in terms of how stringent their academic requirements were. And there were lots of smart kids that I ran into; it was daunting. But I managed to survive. I learned, after being there, that Berkeley was such that about forty percent of the incoming freshmen didn't make it to sophomore year. You've got a high attrition rate, very daunting. Mainly because of the academic standards varied all over the map, and the different high schools. So it was really very challenging to survive. The other thing about it was, at that time, there was essentially self-segregation. So if you were Asian, you didn't date anybody, even casually, who was not Asian and so on. So there were the Hillel club for Jewish students and the Japanese, there was an Asian something student club and so on. And everybody on a social basis self-segregated, even though there was no ruling about it. This is in the mid- to late-'50s. It was sort of the pattern of acceptance, certainly in California.