Rough Draft
This has been a year different from any other. It all started when I got my acceptance letter to the University of Minnesota the day after Christmas. I was so happy because I didn’t think that I’d get into this school. After that happened I started realizing how lucky I am and that I should be more grateful for the opportunities and experiences I’ve had in my life. Now that I’m here and have had the experiences I’ve had thus far in my undergraduate schooling, I know this is where I’m meant to be.
At first, arriving here was an adjustment. I’m from a small-ish town, depending how you look at it, and I’ve never really experienced life at such a big scale as it is in Minneapolis. Also, I was all alone. I didn’t have any of my close friends to have as a security blanket so I really learned how to put myself out there. That was difficult at some points since I am a generally shy person. I was able to find an article that interviewed some incoming freshmen on move-in day and shares statistics of first year students and their dropout rates compared to how they spend their time. College really does have the opportunity to turn a teenager’s life upside down. Thankfully, I was able to learn how to figure out how I wanted to spend my time and met some good people to surround myself with. I think that college is different for everyone and everyone experiences different things. It’s scary making decisions since they have the potential of having an effect on the rest of your life so it’s important to be smart but to also know when it’s okay to have fun.
Since the University of Minnesota is such a huge school, that brings a lot of diversity. I went to a high school where there was some diversity, but it wasn’t lacking diversity. Here though, there is a lot more diversity. I didn’t realize how diverse this campus actually is. I’ve noticed here, people are more integrated with socializing with others outside of their race. In high school, that wasn’t the case and usually people who were the same race tended to hang out with those who were of the same race. Nobody had anything against one another, but that’s just the way it was. In high school it wasn’t rare if there was a class of all white students, but here I’m surprised if there is a class with only white students. I don’t have a single class that doesn’t have a diverse group of students. I like this way more because it offers other cultures to learn from one another and creates amazing conversations and opinions that benefit not just learning in the classroom but also outside the classroom too.
I was introduced to this awesome article about racism and the view of the youth in today’s day and age. It interviews young people all different races and they are asked to define racism and some interesting things were found. Something that I thought was interesting from it was that “although a majority of Millennials in each racial and ethnic group stumbled at the question or defined racism in interpersonal terms, young people of color were more likely to see it as a shared, group experience, while white Millennials saw racism as something that is perpetrated or experienced by a single person” (Apollon 2011). It’s interesting to see the differences in views from people who share similar ages but are of a different race. I think it’s important to accept everyone no matter their ethnic background or the color of their skin. Racism needs to stop. We’re all human and that’s all that should matter.
Editor's note: This essay is the second in a three-part Colorlines.com series on research conducted by our publisher…www.colorlines.com
(For the final draft, I will include more video and pictures, as well as links continuing my first year experience and how it’s made me feel and what I’ve done.)
Rough Draft Bibliography
Apollon, D. (2011, June 26). What’s Racism? That’s Harder for Youth to Answer Than You
Think. Color Lines. Retrieved from http://www.colorlines.com/
Mack, J. (2010, September 6). For College Freshmen, First Year is One Upheaval. Michigan
Live. Retrieved from http://www.mlive.com/#/0