Gueve Ataie
On Trinity College’s campus there are many problems regarding minority students fitting into the social scene and social groups on campus. At Trinity there is a group called PRIDE and its goal is to make minority students transition from high school to college be smoother. The PRIDE group brings many minority students together at the beginning of the school year in order to make them feel more comfortable on campus and feel like they have a group that they fit into. The group almost sets the minority students on a different start than most of the other students on campus by automatically putting them in a group of friends rather than having them make friends on their own like most of the other freshmen. This is the problem with PRIDE, it starts off by separating minority freshman students from the other freshmen on campus and doesn’t give them opportunity to join friends groups with many different people like most other students on campus. This in turn causes the students not in PRIDE to unconsciously exclude PRIDE students because they feel as if they already have their friend group and social scene and do not want to intermingle with the other students.
As a solution to this problem PRIDE must change the way that it tries to make minority students feel more comfortable. PRIDE must do what it is doing now and make minority students feel comfortable and welcome when they first arrive to Trinity but also allow them the space and opportunity to incorporate with the whole student body. Right now PRIDE schedules too much of the students’ first experiences here which takes away from the students’ opportunities to mingle with people in their dorm, floor, and grade to figure out who their friends group will become. PRIDE should be something that minority students know is there if they need it but it should encourage them to first try to make friends the way they regularly would rather than just putting the students in a group with other minorities and secluding them from the rest of the student body. If PRIDE wants the Trinity campus to be a diverse campus then it should allow for white students and minority students to have more opportunities to interact when they first arrive to campus like social gatherings amongst all freshman students rather than just the minorities. If PRIDE continues to put minorities in their own bubble when they arrive to campus they will always feel left out from the rest of the students because in reality they are left out, not because they are minorities but because they were never given good chances to make friends with students outside of the pride group.
The events that occurred in the spring of the last school year caused many divisions among race on Trinity’s campus and this was not good for making minorities feeling included. That feeling may have been brought over to this year as well and the Trinity student body will never benefit from these feelings. Trinity’s PRIDE should research and explore what similar groups to it at other schools are doing that are proven to be very effective in integrating and making minorities feel included on campus. On top of that, Pride can see if there are any information groups that can be created to let the white students understand how the minority students feel on campus so that events like the ones from last spring can be prevented from now on.