Cultural Diversity

Well to start off, I grew up in and went to school in a small town of about 1500 people. Of course being in Iowa, it was a farming community and it's one of those towns that it only takes about all of thirty minutes for news to get around town and back to your parents if you screw up, lucky me. But there something else that seems to be a trend with small towns, they aren't as open to cultural diversity. It seems like, or at least for my hometown, that there was a set of norms and anybody who stuck out was looked down upon, quite the opposite of cities like Iowa City and Davenport.

Diversity is all around us, we just have to be willing to look deep enough. It might not be something as shallow or blatant as skin color or sexual orientation, it could be something along the lines of growing up in a neighborhood with a high crime rate and being scared for your life every day or maybe the kid you're sitting next to lost both their parents when they were too young to know better and they've grown up differently then you because of it. There are numerous subtle aspects that make us who we are, some of them we're comfortable with and we put out there for the world to see. While others might be more personal or painful and we keep them to ourselves. Those are several things that you should keep in mind when you move into a different environment like one found on a college campus.

An important facet of diversity to keep in mind that not everyone is like you. Just because someone is different doesn't make them weird or awkward. I'm working on adjusting my own views and keeping an open mind as I continue classes this year.

Social Media Week

The social media week assignment was definitely something new for me. I decided to use my Twitter because it seemed the easiest since I'd already been using it. But there was such a difference from when I tweeted before to tweeting for the assignment. Mainly because we were told to tweet 20 times but the only time I ever tweet is when something witty pops into my head or I hear a great quote. I don't got around thinking about what I can tweet, there are just small moments of inspiration that cause me to. So it was quite a different experience for me, it was also nice to have all the new posts from the list we were told to follow. I mainly used it just to connect with my friends previously but once I followed the list of accounts I was getting posts from things like NPR that really helped to keep me updated with the world rather than just my friends.

Some of the relationships I formed through this are great. Quite a few electrical engineering accounts wouldn't follow me back but that was mainly because the only ones I could find were things like companies or fun facts. Still, it was interesting to read some of their posts and I look forward to connecting with more people involved in electrical engineering through Twitter in the future. I think Twitter has a bigger effect on people than they realize, or at least it does for me. I hadn't realized what a time filler it was until this assignment, it seems like whenever I'm somewhere like standing in line at the MU or taking a break from my homework, I turn to my Twitter feed and see what everyone has posted. Even if I had just done so 15 minutes earlier. I enjoyed this assignment and look forward to continue making use of the connections I formed through it.