I know a kid whose parents are from Taiwan.

I know a kid in my neighborhood, whose parents are from Taiwan.
He played football in high school. He was not very tall but strong and fast.
He was passionate and crazy about football, and built a fitness gym in his garage to condition his body.
He was a good kid with good manner and repectful to adults.
His grades were OK and attended UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) after high school.
I recall that the economy was bad and jobs were scarce the year he graduated from college, but he was offered 3 jobs 4 months before graduation. These 3 jobs offers were from Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and UCSB (as its football team's coaching assisant).
After working as a tax auditor for 3 years with Deloitte, he was accepted to Columbia's MBA program.
He now works on corporate mergers and acquisitions while many of his high school friends who went to Berkeley are still engineers today. 
He says that he always talks a lot about football whenever he interviews for jobs.
I guess having good social skills and playing a sport (for boys in particular) is at least as important as excelling academically.