When I was applying to college there was a lot of talk around things like diversity and specifically affirmative action, and while applying we were told to keep that in mind. A lot of the school I applied to were fairly diverse but there was always a majority race at the school. When I got into Macaulay at Lehman, I had found that in our cohort there wasn’t any black students. I found this interesting at first because I was expecting at least one from my prior knowledge of the college. It does bring in the question as to whether or not Macaulay looks at race being an important factor when reviewing applications and it was something I thought of looking into.
Some new ideas that came from putting these things together were that even campuses that boast of their diversity, can lack diversity in another sense. Macaulay was a program that spoke of their diversity yet I still find a lack of certain groups and it would vary by campus I assume. It may be that Lehman only takes a smaller amount of students opposed to other campuses but it’s not certain.
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I’m a little unclear on what two events you’ve synthesized. There’s definitely two ideas here– affirmative action and diversity, but for this exercise I was interested in having you consider new ideas that come from putting two events in conversation with one another. I can see how the first day at MHC is an event, but I’m not sure what the other event would be– the act of applying to college? or a conversation you had with a counselor about how to apply to college? If that’s the case, perhaps another way to synthesize these two events would be to look at your own reaction to both situations. Perhaps in writing about your reactions, you’d discover a new idea? or at the very least, discover how you rationalized an emphasis on diversity and then an apparent lack of it.
DW