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Melting Pot Was Fine, But Salad Bowl Tastes Better

Back in 1880’s, approximately 25 million Europeans immigrated to the U.S.

Germans, Italians, Jews, Greeks, Hungarians, Russians and other Slavs, the majority of which were younger than 30, boarded up and traveled across the ocean in search for a better life. Their mother Europe was impoverished. While this age has seen the bloody rise of young and optimistic national states, the imperialism that had made Europe what it was was boiling. The First World War would see it shattered to pieces, along with millions of lives. The young people who took the ships a couple of decades earlier wouldn’t witness this. They would survive, even through great economic crises that were to come in the 1930’s.

Even then there were American conservatives, the so-called nativists, who frowned at this flood of immigrants, fearing their lack of adaptability, or even more, their unwillingness to assimilate into whatever they considered to be the one true American framework. The multicultural soup or the melting pot, they claimed, actually turned into a dumping ground. The Immigration Act of 1924 severely limited the number of European and African immigrants, and banned Asian immigrants from entering the U.S. altogether. Asian peoples were therefore proclaimed incompatible. They didn’t pursue happiness in a desirable way, the act seemed to imply. Newcomers even lacked qualifications for breathing American air, it also implied, introducing literacy test for the few ones granted the access to American ground. The act’s purpose was “to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity”.

The American identity has been comprised of so many different cultures that came to seek freedom and conduct their quest for happiness, in their own terms, at times when the rest of the world was quite a disadvantageous place to do so.

This American pot has ever since been a place where all of the cultures melt together. However, it has also aspired to grow into a salad bowl, where the ingredients would never get deprived of their identity, because their respective identities don’t threaten or jeopardize one another. They hoped to become Americans without having to break up with their roots, their past, who they were or what they were trying to become.

Cultural differences shouldn’t make people different, nor should they imply their subservience to one another. “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” wrote Thomas Jefferson.

Today of all times no one can say that America is a perfect place to abide, or to migrate to. No one can claim that it succeeded in conquering its own political, racial, cultural and other demons, nor that it is the safest place to live. But we should still be allowed to say that it is a place which aspires and struggles to become safe, liberal, and respectable, just like the people who inhabit it. Having said that, there are certain people or entities that want to bridge the gap by eliminating racial profiling, stereotypes and misconceptions about certain cultures in America. Companies like Beyond Exchange, is a great example (beyondculturalevents.com). Their International Cultural Exchange Program is just what the country needs, even more now, as the oneness that the country boosts about, is diminishing in the land of immigrants. Programs such as the cultural exchange program from Beyond Exchange allow participants from diverse cultural background to represent their unique cultures, and show the Americans who they really are, and bring about more awareness. This way the Americans can have a better understanding of the different cultures, and people can start trusting each other in this country, before making an opinion on false or no knowledge at all.

The pursuit of happiness has always been an unalienable right. Maybe we should finally stop considering our ways of pursuing it better than anyone else’s.

 

Jelena Ciric

Syed Sayem

My name is Syed Sayem and I have been working with Beyond Management since 2009.

Currently, I am a Senior Programmer Analyst at the UK branch of Beyond Management. For those who have interest in joining Beyond UK, I would like to introduce my duties and my role within the company. My various duties include maintaining and troubleshooting middleware web and app servers. As part of my duties, I setup the Weblogic domain with cluster environment for multiple applications, and apache webserver for forwarding proxy request and host static content for our websites. Moreover, apache adds one more layer between the internet and Weblogic app server. I write script for deploying the application to cluster and monitor logs for any error message. 

 

Our team takes care of external websites and stand alone applications. We use Oracle Access Manager (OAM) for application authentication and authorization. The application utilizes single sign on solution (SSO). We have four environments, namely, Production, DR, QA and Dev. We use global load balancer for load balancing and high availability. If there are any production issues that take more time to resolve, then we fail over the application from production to DR. This approach ensures that our website has minimal outage. 

 

As you can see I have a quite diverse work responsibilities. I really enjoy working for Beyond Management. We have a friendly and multicultural environment. We have a great training program that is driven by our senior engineers, which helps new comers to learn quickly and familiarize with the environments that we use for our production and non-production. Beyond Management also organizes spectacular cultural shows. If you are looking for an IT job then I would recommend you to join Beyond Management. You will be amazed at what we have to offer you in our Company.

Zainab Sanaa

Information Technology (IT) is evolving and developing every day. New technologies in computers and mobile devices are shaping the way the world works. IT is the area of managing technology and spans wide varieties of areas and is not restricted to things such as processors, computer software and hardware, programming languages etc. Information technology is starting to spread further into almost every other industry like hospitals, hotels, mobile phones etc. Many areas of public health, including vital statistics, investigation and research, surveillance, epidemiology, surveys, laboratories technology, maternal and child health, and environmental health, use IT to achieve their goals and objectives. IT includes the use of computers and communications, and the transformation of data into information and knowledge.

As a fresher it was sometimes overwhelming for me to understand the different areas in Information Technology. The knowledge and skills required in information technology come from the applied engineering sciences, especially information, computer, and systems engineering sciences, and from professional practice. Having a background in engineering made it a little easier for me to understand all these. The rest was taken care by the technical training staff of Beyond Management.

Another important thing was to understand its applications in the various industries apart from just computing. As a new comer I found difficult to choose the right course which best suited my profile. Beyond Management was very helpful during the entire process. Right from making me understand the basics to making me choose the right field as a career option. The highly skilled and very helpful trainers of Beyond Management guided me through the entire process and were a major help.

The kind of exposure that I got at Beyond Management is something that I would recommend to everyone. It was a great learning experience where apart from the technical knowledge there was a great display of cultural exchange. The learning center of Beyond Management provided the right technical expertise that a trainee needs. The one month spent there was a great learning experience and added a great deal to my technical skills. It trained me for the corporate world, which would be very helpful for my promising future.

Zainab Sanaa.
Programmer Analyst.