It’s that time of year. The bright red farm implements are on display in front of the Memorial Union. It is an exhibit that takes me right back to high school years. That’s right, every year at my rural high school the members of FFA drove their (parents’) Deere-green tractors to school. These were not small tractors; I’m talking farm vehicles with the value of small houses.

When I saw the tractor here on campus, it got me thinking about how interesting an opportunity it is to be at Iowa State. I’m not joking. In many ways, it is true that our ethnic makeup is not the most diverse. There is serious work to be done in that area. But diversity exists in other senses too.

I realized that here we have people who have come from places in Iowa like Aplington or Le Mars or Wapello. I remember first showing up to college and recognizing many faces from various small-town high school contests that everyone from small schools do – be it jazz band, basketball or speech contest.

Then there are students from Chicago, New York, Southern California and other urban centers. According to the fact book, we have students from all 50 states.

Then there is also the international perspective. There are students from 116 different countries studying at Iowa State. Many of these students come from large metropolitan centers.

Indeed, Iowa State is very unique in its urban/rural diversity. In fact, it’s probably one of the few places in the world with such a mix. It’s remarkable to think that in 1858 a group of people got together and set up the State Agricultural College and Model Farm on 2,000 acres of land in Ames and here were are today, where people come to study here from tiny towns and gargantuan cities alike.

I have heard stories from black students who have been told by some students from Iowa that they are the first black person they have seen up close. Likewise, many international students come from places where there is not the diversity that exists in the United States. Many international students will have never met people from Latin America, the Caribbean or East Asia before.

I remember a conversation in the newsroom at the Daily in which the Iowans had to explain to our counterpart from Chicago what a grain silo was.

International students have told me that they could not believe where the traffic fiascoes and lines familiar to their home cities had gone.

They ask why there are no small corner shops, only large chain mega-stores in which to get food or clothes. The rural students wonder where the local merchant who knows what you want as you walk in is.

I grew up in the country on an acreage and graduated with 67 other students. I’ve had friends from large cities visit my house and ask how I could live when the nearest house was so far away. “Doesn’t it worry you to be so far away from neighbors at night?” “Aren’t you worried about your safety at night?”

I’ve tried to explain many a time that “neighbors” in a rural Iowa sense could mean that you live four or five miles apart. Although our houses are geographically farther apart, I am willing to bet that people in our “neighborhood” are just as or more aware of what’s happening in the area than in most urban areas.

You folks from the country know what I’m talking about. If somebody in the area’s got a new truck or a new patio on the house, everybody knows about it. People keep tabs on the place when driving by, and the cafes, school meetings and church coffees are miniature rural news centers. The small-town newspapers keep track of the Jones’ and Andersons’ Saturday brunch and that the Wilsons entertained their relatives from Nebraska.

By the same token, the big-city students offer their lives of subways, traffic jams, art museums and large high schools.

The examples could go on. I will venture to guess that such conversations take place every fall in the residence halls.

Just on our own residence hall floor there are people from Seoul, Korea and New York City (both in the top five of world’s largest cities) living alongside people from Forest City and Polk City, Iowa.

We had some of the most dynamic conversations of all when we were comparing rural living to city life. Although many of our floormates came from opposite ends of the Earth, we found that the city kids sometimes had more in common with each other despite the cultural, ethnic or religious differences than they did with country students.

For many people at Iowa State, Ames is the largest city they have ever lived in. And for many more, Ames is the smallest city in which they have lived. For those students from big cities, the tractors must have come as a pretty interesting development. And for those of us from the remote hamlets of Iowa, it must have felt just like home.

Omar Tesdell is a sophomore in journalism and mass communication and technical communication from Slater. He is online editor at the Daily.