Addressing the issue of diversity here on our campus is without a doubt important. As student leaders and administration work together to make progress on the issues we have on our campus, we have to acknowledge the wide array of diversity that already calls our campus home.

My freshman year blew me out of the water when I saw the homogeneity of the student body. Everything seemed very cookie-cutter-like. Where was I going to find culture and diversity here in Iowa? As time went on, I realized, in an after-school-special way, that Iowa is diverse. The diversity numbers didn’t show up in ethnicity, but there is more to diversity than your ethnic background. Although it seems like Iowa State is plagued with a boring level of similarities, our experience here goes past first impressions.ÿ

To dissect diversity, we can take it apart in the same over-analytical way renowned by students trying to meet a page count for an impossible assignment. But in all seriousness, diversity does exist and does influence the experience at Iowa State — every aspect of college life here is a demonstration of diversity.

ÿThe student body does have ethnic minorities. But still, these numbers are represented on campus and many of these ethnic groups have organizations where they practice their culture and invite others with whom to share their culture. Although only in smaller numbers, various ethnic groups are not absent from the ISU campus, and they are just as much a part of this community as anyone else is. Throughout the year, there are many different symposiums, awareness weeks and festivities that help to bring various parts of the world to our campus.

ÿOne of Iowa State’s selling points for me was the diverse curriculum. When I was looking at colleges, many of the schools I was planning on going to were smaller liberal arts schools. But here, my opportunities are endless. Smaller campuses with focused areas of expertise breed homogeneity, but Iowa State offers seven undergraduate colleges with many majors, which attract a large number of educators and students alike.

I have several friends who were born and raised in Ames, and I have other friends who grew up in a community five minutes away from mine, which is 4,000 miles away. The style of living in your hometown is also a big difference that shows diversity. Farm life and city life are contrastingly separate cultures in themselves.

Some people have more people on their residence floor than they had in their graduating class. On the other hand, I had more people in my graduating class than the number of people a friend of mine has in her entire hometown. The subculture a person experienced growing up has a role in who they are and their mannerisms.

Diversity comes in many forms here at Iowa State, and although we commonly think of diversity to be limited to those basic classifications like ethnicity, sex and religious backgrounds, there are countless other ways that diversity exists. Students make their own college experiences diverse through working while in school, where they make their school-year residences, organizations they belong to on campus and even the level of sociability they practice.

You could ever determine minorities by the people who voluntarily sign up for a certain course, versus those who take it because their advisor said they needed it for graduation.

Whether you are a fifth-year senior who still lives on your dorm floor or a music major, it’s easy to find someone with different interests than you. There is not a single person on this campus exactly like you. If clich‚s were incorrect, would they be so popular? Never judge a book by its cover. As a student body, we have much room for improvement in tolerance of difference, which is a first step in the right direction for encouraging growth and harboring of a multicultural campus.

I am a strong supporter of a multicultural campus and of creating more programming on campus to help us understand the various cultural and sub-cultural groups that call our campus home. At the same time, there can be a small amount of relief in knowing we already coexist with a whole lot of personal diversity. The definition of diversity has come to be aligned with ethnicity so much that we’ve failed to see other types of diversity that have been under our noses all this time.