Students manage social lives amidst diversityPosted in Articles, Campus Life, New Media, United States on 2010-11-18 19:13Z by Steven |
Students manage social lives amidst diversity
The Dartmouth
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire
2010-11-11
Marina Villeneuve, The Dartmouth Staff
Editor’s Note: This is the second installment in a three-part series investigating race at the College. The experiences and opinions expressed are the views of individual students, and should not be considered representative of wider communities.
When Marian Gutierrez ’13 stepped onto Dartmouth’s campus as a freshman, she said found she herself a member of a student population strikingly different than the one that existed in her hometown of Los Angeles.
“It wasn’t as diverse as I thought it would be,” she said. “It was a bit of a culture shock.”
The College’s efforts to widen the diversity of the student body have resulted in an undergraduate population increasingly reflective of national demographics — as of this fall, the undergraduate population is 8 percent African-American, 14 percent Asian-American, 7 percent Latino, 4 percent Native American, 7 percent international and 53 percent white, according to the Office of Institutional Research…
…Students of mixed race said their backgrounds allowed them to mediate between different groups on campus.
“Being half black and half Mexican has made my life more interesting here — I feel two ways at same time,” Chris Norman ’13 said. “There’s more than one group I can go to and relate with. For me, it’s easier to branch out to the mainstream community being mixed race.”…
Read the entire article here.