Extending a Hand Across Cultures

Many times, sitting in John Jay Dining Hall, I look across the room and see clusters of my fellow classmates—friends sitting with friends, eating, laughing, chattering, a group of black students at one table, a group of Indians at another. In calculus, I see my Chinese classmates sitting together in the corner of the room, the dull sound of the chalk moving across the blackboard punctured by their whispers.

Columbia emphasizes diversity of the student body as essential to enriching the learning experience. Selecting candidates from a wide range of countries and states, the University hopes to foster interactions among students of different backgrounds. Even though admissions always looks for more ways to increase the existing diversity, many students tend to bond more tightly with others of the same cultural background.

I also see that, more than even a common cultural background, it is shared activities and close living quarters that ease the process of forming friendships. But culture clubs that support diversity by promoting the heritage of a certain ethnicity could unwittingly, and ironically, foster cliques through the frequent social interactions among members of the same race within these clubs. People in these clubs naturally identify with others of their heritage because of the comfort that comes from being with those who can understand one’s cultural upbringing. It is only to be expected that some international students will hang out more often with people who hail from the same country or speak the same language as they do.

Some of my Asian-American friends, in regretful tones, make the observation that Asians are one of the more “cliquey” groups on campus. But if this perception is true, it would only be natural when one considers that the undergraduate student body is roughly 20 percent Asian, making them the largest racial minority groups at Columbia. Moreover, what constitutes the idea of the Asian “clique” itself is blurry. In fact there is much diversity in what one might call an Asian clique, for Chinese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, Koreans, and Japanese often mingle together, even though the cultures of each differ considerably.

If Columbia wants to encourage more interaction among people of different ethnic backgrounds, the dorm floor would be a good place to start. Enhancing the diversity on the floor effectively fuses the living experience with a learning one, to use the phrase that is the underlying concept of the Living and Learning Center. On my floor in Furnald, I live with people who are Georgian, Romanian, Indian, Chinese, and Armenian. And our interests are as far-ranging as our nationalities, for our intended majors span through economics, biology, physics, music, and international politics. Yet, we have made close friendships by discussing the books we read in Literature Humanities, sharing the music we enjoy, and laughing at the same jokes. We have become such good friends that we all want to block together again next year, realizing that living together in close proximity facilitates the formation of friendships, since, given our exterior differences, we might not have become friends had we not been forced to deal with each other on a daily basis.

Although the University strives to include a broad range of cultural and racial diversity, much can still be done to achieve more equal geographic representation. It is true that by drawing roughly 15 percent of the student body from other countries, Columbia successfully promotes interactions with international students. However, a disproportionate number of students come from the New York and New Jersey region while the Midwestern and Southern states are underrepresented. Although it is true that not as many students apply from the underrepresented areas, efforts should still be made to include more of them at Columbia in order to build an even greater range of diversity.

While we do have a natural tendency to be with people of the same cultural background, we should not limit ourselves in this way, but rather strive to step out of our comfort zones and initiate more cross-cultural interactions. So next time you go to John Jay or walk into that lecture room in Pupin, why not sit next to someone with whom you wouldn’t imagine having anything in common? Strike up a conversation. Take that risk. Columbia, like many other educational institutions, seeks to foster many kinds of diversity on campus. Despite the improvements it can make in creating more equal representation across geographic lines, admissions does its best to put together a class of culturally and racially unique students. But we, as the students, must also do our part to cultivate a truly diverse environment. It would be a pity not to take advantage of the fact that we are in the country’s most cosmopolitan city with as heterogeneous a group of classmates as one can imagine. Through increased socialization with students of different ethnicities, we can seek to understand a commonality among us that could crystallize into lifelong friendships.

The author is a Columbia College first-year.