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Despite their popular portrayal as high achieving and structurally incorporated, race continues to shape the career choices of Asian American college students. As second-generation Americans, Asian Americans negotiate a constellation of factors when deciding their career choices, most notably, pressures from immigrant parents, awareness of labor market discrimination, fear of being tokenized in particular occupational fields, and influences from peer networks. These findings help elucidate how race and the social context of immigrant adaptation can affect the occupational trajectories of Asian Americans and other children of immigrants in the United States, regardless of their educational achievement and socioeconomic status.
Asian Americans are a diverse population inclusive of persons with ethnic origins in East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and the Philippines.* They represent the fastest growing racial group segment of the undergraduate population in the United States (Chang, Park, Lin, Poon, & Nakanishi, 2007) but only about 6% of college students nationally (Teranishi, 2010). Despite the growth, there remains little research illuminating their college experiences and implications for student affairs practice. Without such research, student services practitioners and institutional leaders can be unconsciously guided by stereotypes in how they work with this socioeconomically diverse population (McEwen, Kodama, Alvarez, Lee, & Liang, 2002; Museus & Kiang, 2009). Prevailing images of Asian Americans as monolithically successful may lead to assumptions that these students require less support than others, even though many are first-generation college students from low- income and immigrant or refugee families (Chang et al., 2007; Suzuki, 2002; Yeh, 2002).
The study presented in this article contri- butes to scholarship on Asian American college students by focusing on career development experiences and contexts of second-generation Asian Americans in college. Throughout this article, I use the terms second generation, immigrant second generation, and new immigrant second generation interchangeably in reference to both U.S.-born children of immigrants (i.e., second- generation Americans) and immigrants who arrived in the United States as young children (i.e., 1.5 generation). New immigrant second generation is a term coined by sociologists who study the experiences of post-1965 immigrants to the United States (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001). Although not all Asian Americans identify as second generation, growing up in immigrant families is common among a great majority of Asian American college students. For...