Diversity

Diversity has a broad range of meaning. I always believed that diversity was people from different backgrounds and experiences in an area. I learned from the presentation last Tuesday that it is much more than that. Sylvester was the name of the speaker that introduced me to the real meaning of diversity. 

Sylvester explained different situations and phenotypes that contribute to diversity. I really enjoyed the way he presented the information. He is a very charismatic speaker. Before his presentation, I would not have ever thought of myself as being diverse, I always thought I was kind of just a standard, boring Caucasian. When  I am compared to someone else I have had different experiences in my life and I may have been raised in a different situation, which would make me diverse.  

Also, when I think of diversity I usually think of a place, like Iowa State, that has a lot of people from other countries. It never really occurred to me how much diversity is in the state of Iowa let alone a community in Iowa. A place does not have to people from other countries or states to considered diverse.

  I believe that it is very important to have diversity in one's community. Diversity helps people understand that there are other ways of life out there than there own. Learning in a community that is diverse helps one understand different cultures and helps educate the persons. People from different backgrounds and experiences bring different ideas and gifts to the table. I mean just look at how diversity affects Iowa State!  

Social Media

When I founded out that the week's assignment had to do with social media, I was dreading it. I have a  Twitter and a Facebook account but I do not really like to write statuses. I have always felt I should only post interesting things, which I run into maybe once a week. I decided to do the Twitter assignment because I already had a twitter account set up.

The hardest part of this assignment, for me, was figuring out what I was going to tweet about. Some of my tweets were pretty decent but the rest were lame because I ran out of things to say. The easiest part was finding businesses and people who shared similar career and major interests as me. I was surprised at how many businesses use twitter, like Mayo Clinic for example.

I like to use Facebook and Twitter solely for communicating with my family and friends. I also have been told through out the years that future employers will look at your media sites. I really do not want to use my social media pages to market myself for a job but I understand people will still look at the page. Some of the articles talked about using Twitter to broadcast yourself to future employers.

One article discussed how the people of Mexico use Twitter for safety. I personally think that this is an amazing and fast way to spread news. I can honestly say I check Facebook and Twitter at least three times a day. I only check the news stations about twice a week. I have learned a lot more than I expected to this week and the assignment actually turned out to be better too.