First Proposal:
Trinity College—the community of our faculty members, the school of our Professors, and the home of our students—has been long affected by issues regarding racism, sexism, violence, sexual abuse, and sexual orientation. However, racism has to be the main key problem here at Trinity College. The “Color and Money” freshmen seminar has recently conducted interviews from students here at this college. We interviewed fifteen sophomores—from different racial backgrounds and social classes—from the Class of 2014. At the interviews, we asked these students questions about their perceptions of race and social class at Trinity College. After finding trends and writing a six page paper of race and social class at Trinity College, I have discovered that race plays a much bigger role here at campus than social class. Students here at Trinity are equally conscious of their social class. However, race is whole different story.
Trinity College has a special program for incoming international students called PRIDE (insert full meaning of acronym later). Students and faculty members thought that this program would be better help their non-white students get accustomed to Trinity College where the majority population is white. Here’s the problem: PRIDE forces these non-white students to segregate themselves from white students before they come to campus. PRIDE is an early program right before college starts. PRIDE has helped these international students create their own group among themselves. Students who participate in PRIDE tend to only hang out with other students who have also participated in PRIDE. Some students do not even bother getting out of their comfort zone and start meeting other people who didn’t participate in this program.
Here’s my solution: PRIDE has to have a whole different structure. Half of the PRIDE program has to be white and the other half has to be non-white. We need to pair each of them, so they can get comfortable getting to know someone else’s culture. I really don’t know what really happens in PRIDE, but perhaps changing activities and the agenda around to get more international students be comfortable approaching people they do not know from the people they already know in PRIDE. Also, during orientation week, we can find other ways to better communicate these different type of students before segregation started becoming apparent and start taking place in their college lives. I want to get more information of PRIDE. Their current structure, the amount of people who take part of it, the kind of people who take part of it, what type of discussions are disscused, and such.