At a campus as expansive as the Park, diversity is a pillar of the student experience. The ability to collaborate across differing cultural and social backgrounds is a skill refined daily within these halls. To examine this, students reflected on specific instances by answering this question: Tell me about a time you had to work with people of different backgrounds and what you learned from it.
Answer: “At work, there’s a variety of people and different political backgrounds. I’ve noticed that a lot of the older people there have different beliefs than the younger people there.”
Answer: “I helped captain one of the teams here at P-CEP for Salem swim and there are so many different girls and different backgrounds on that team, but when we were all working together and all in the same environment there were no differences between us.”
Answer: “In my multicultural literature class there’s a whole lot of diverse groups in there. Whenever having a conversation about different racial topics, everybody has different things to contribute.”
Answer: “I had this friend who’s also Indian, but I’m from North India and she’s South Indian. India is very culturally diverse. Hearing her perspective and the rituals she does really opened my mind to different cultures. There’s many similarities I found in my culture and their culture, and it really made me more appreciative of other cultures.”
Answer: “I’ve been working with a few people of different backgrounds from me on my impact committee for my club, APAC (Asian Pacific American Club). A big part of that is putting together a conference, and we have different workshops. I’m on the workshop committee, so that includes bringing in different activities from different cultures, and some of [the activities] are more serious discussions and working in a group with people from different backgrounds.”
Answer: “I volunteered at the women’s shelter last year, and in the women’s shelter there’s a lot of domestic violence survivors and teenagers who left home because of the state of their household. I learned that not everyone has the same privileges as you do, and it’s really important to take that into consideration.”
