In my life, the best example of constructive cultural mixing has been right here at the UCLA. I am only a burgeoning sophomore and already in my one year I have seen and learned more about other cultures than I have in my entire lifetime.
According to UCLA’s website there are nearly 30,000 undergraduates and a little over 40,000 students total if you count the graduate students. With this many people co-existing on one campus, there is no way not to be exposed to someone else’s culture or to exchange your own culture with someone else. This word “culture” is stretched out quite eclectically here as the student body makes up a plethora of religions, ethnicities, races sexual identities and many more. Two people coming from the same high school may have as many cultural differences as two people from countries on opposite sides of the world. One of my roommates last year was coincidentally from my home state of Pennsylvania and my other roommate was from Beijing. In our time living together we all blended cultures by sharing customs, beliefs and living habits. As a whole we found that we had many similarities and differences based off of our cultural upbringings. My roommate from China made me understand that although you can be seen as a minority in one place, it’s important to take into consideration that somewhere everyone is a minority.
An amazing thing about UCLA however is that there is really no such thing as a being part of a “minority” culture, because even if you are part of a smaller classification, there are still likely thousands of other students in that underrepresented group. For example, according to UCLA Undergraduate Admissions, out of the approximate 27,941 undergraduates enrolled in 2012 only 3.88% were Black. However since the student body is so large, that still meant there were 1,083 black students enrolled total. In my high school in suburban Pennsylvania there were less than 40 black students total. At UCLA I have had the rare chance to branch out and meet many types of people I had not gotten the chance to interact with before college, and may not get as much of a chance to afterwards. This happened on the opposite front as well because many of my friends told me that I was the first Jewish person they had ever met. In those cases I was able to break down many of their preconceived serotypes about my culture the same way they were able to change the way I saw their own.
Since the focus at UCLA is on education, every student shares a shared common goal and thus when we are being exposed to the differences in each others cultures we are still about to draw back on the collective understanding we all have towards our degree aspirations. It’s certainly not a perfectly harmonic system, but I doubt there are many other environments in the world where culture is positively hared on this level.
-Zach
English 4W: Transnational America 