tags: WPI, college
This is non-technical, but I suppose it's my blog so I can put whatever I want here.
This is a story about college and feeling accepted. One day I showed up about 30 minutes early to Chinese class, so I sat in the chairs by the Eastern Staircases in Salisbury Labs. A lot of buildings at WPI are old and only have 1 bathroom per floor, with some even floors having mens bathrooms and odd floors having womens bathrooms.
I grew up in Maine, which was about 98% white and well.. I wasn't white. Growing up I didn't really feel like anybody was racist towards me, but through TV shows that depicted racism I got the feeling that people were naturally distrustful of people like me. [0]
That day, there was another WPI student who was working on her own things, and she asked me to watch her stuff while she went to the bathroom. I was shocked. Omg. I've never had a stranger ask me to look after their stuff before. I was so shocked that somebody would trust "someone like me" that it took me a while to respond, and obviously I was willing to. That was when I started feeling accepted at WPI and I suppose the US (I moved to the US at a young age)
[0]: It's kind of ironic. These shows didn't depict racism because the writers were racist, but rather the writers included racism as a form of education, which in turn made me aware of these stereotypes that I hadn't been exposed to.