I attended The Who am I? Who are You? Who are We? event that I found on the STEM EE Scholars Calendar. I felt good going into this event because I went with my friends and I feel like I come from a diverse background as well. I think my level of comfortableness going into this event stems from my own different identities such as being a female, being American, but also being Indian. It also stems from my familiarity with diversity and inclusion efforts. I am in a Women Gender and Sexuality Studies and we talk a lot about diversity in lecture and recitation in that class so I’m familiar with the terms that we went over in this event and the overall topic. I definitely learned about more pertaining to everyone in the world rather than just mainly females that I learn about in my WGSS class.

I learned some things about how students feel on this campus. Someone in the event talked about how he felt really bad because he felt as he had so much privilege. I feel like privilege is innate, such as being born male or white is a privilege. It is not someone’s fault he/she was born this way and he/she should not feel bad either. That individual should just make sure to take into account that he/she has that privilege and not disregard it because it does benefit him/her in some way. Diversity and Inclusion impacts STEM in many ways. For example, during this event we saw a picture/comic where women in STEM were not appreciated or not given the same benefits as men in women. This is actually true because a long time ago it was just men who were in the STEM fields while women stayed home taking care of kids. Many women nowadays have gotten into the STEM field but it is still not appreciated or on the same level of equality as men in the STEM field.

In my sociology class, we were talking about gender stratification and there was a graph of men and women in different fields/careers from 1970 to 2005. Engineering, which is a main factor of STEM as a whole was in the men section mainly and not many women had gotten into it as the years went by. Being in this scholars program, I have so many female friends that are engineering and I myself have changed to engineering as well so it was really interesting to see as a whole world engineering is still mainly dominated by men. I think there should always be more focus on diversity in this university. We have so many programs, however we really need to encourage students to get into these diversity involved programs to understand and realize the main pillars of diversity and inclusion to not offend or be ignorant to anyone. I think the presenter did a good job of going through the material and providing many examples as well. I felt like it could be a little more interactive in the groups, but overall I was very engaged because of the way the presenter presented the material. I think there are always people who are hesitant to accidentally offend someone because saying something could actually offend someone even if they did not mean it. It is always good to be cautious and think before you speak, especially in this area.