Others in Our Community

 I'm part of a small minority at Dickinson: a transfer student. I don't know the exact statistics but when I went to orientation as a transfer there were about 14 other transfers spread across two class years, and roughly 600 freshmen, or first years as they are called at Dickinson.

Orientation was a particularly rough time. The freshmen were very excitable-- after all it was their first time away from home, they were going to make new friends, and participate in all of the extra curricular activities a liberal arts school has to offer. The orientation was designed for the freshmen and aside from the few special programs for transfers, we were completely ignored. During one activity, the school handed out class of 2017 shirts and when I asked them if they had any class of 2015 shirts they stared at me blankly and asked why on earth would I want a 2015 shirt.

Nobody really thought less of me for being a transfer, and I didn't think less of anyone for being a Dickinson student for the entirety of their undergraduate studies. It's just different and sometimes manifests itself in different ways.

As Dickinson is a small school, come junior year, a lot of the students had already formed their friend groups. While I do have some traditional Dickinson students for friends, I ended up spending most of my time with other transfer students. As a transfer student, they room you with other transfer students, most likely due to housing constraints, but it makes it harder to escape that group.

My second year at Dickinson, I opted to live in special interest housing as a way to meet more people. I live in the Global House, and my roommate is a junior and always brings her friends to visit and introduces us. Doing extra curricular activities on campus has also provided me with a chance to interact with traditional students.

Sometimes my friends and I will talk about the differences in our first two years of education. It's a fairly politically neutral topic and doesn't really cause fights. Sometimes, I feel left out, because many of my friends has experiences here that I never had but then I think back about my time at Montgomery County Community College and can't imagine what my life would have been like without my time there.

Edit:

While this wasn't part of my original post, something happened tonight that I think belongs here.

I received a call from an older friend who works for a school district nearby. She had asked me previously to help as a translator for the school district as they had just enrolled an Iraqi girl whose parents spoke very little English.

"Remember that girl I told you about from Iraq? Her father mixed up the time of the parent teacher conference and came in at 7:30 in the morning. I asked him why he moved here all the way from Iraq. It seems strange to go all the way from Iraq to Roslyn, Pennsylvania. He said he wanted to buy a house."

We chatted a bit about moving. My friend was originally from New York and talked about her move from Brooklyn to the suburbs of Pennsylvania. A little while later, she asked me another question.

"Jessica, aren't all Iraqis terrorists?"

Though I was not attacked in this statement, I was offended, and even embarrassed.. As a Middle East Studies major, I spend a great deal of time discussing the peoples, languages, histories and cultures of the MENA region. In my little academic bubble, I don't hear statements like this too often, but I feel they are reflective of a lot of the general American mentality towards people from the Middle East.These statements aren't always made out of hate: most people get their information from news reports, or second hand through other biased informants and can only form their opinions on what information they have available.

I bring this up because fear of the unknown can lead to prejudice. After I told my friend of my good experiences with some Iraqi people, she began to calm down. Anyone can be a terrorist, terrorism isn't a genetic trait or an ethnic trait.

In order to better understand the others in our community, we need to learn about them. In a world where we are ever connected by technology this becomes increasingly important. In the old days where trans-ocean travel was only possible via boat, it was a lot easier to ignore other groups and live with the mentality of "us" and "our land here" and "them" and "their land far over there." With technology and ease of travel, this is no longer the case. "We" and "they" share the same space know.