Diversity and Inclusion

T his week for my ePortfolio post, I attended the regular STEM Scholars Wednesday event in the journalism building. The speaker at this week’s event is a member of Ohio State’s Student Life Multicultural Center, which is a student life department that offers hundreds of events a year for cultural/heritage celebrations, leadership workshops, and diversity and inclusion events. The event for Wednesday was a diversity and inclusion general discussion. Going into the event, I felt that I already knew the material and was not gonna learn much from it because I had already attended other diversity events. I still felt a little uncomfortable, however, because even though I’d like to think that I am culturally aware and I try to promote inclusion, I am not very diverse being a white american male. Even with these thoughts in the back of my mind, I think that the speaker did a very good job presenting and I learned more than a few things from the discussion.

During a discussion about diversity and inclusion, privilege is bound to come up at some point. For me, and I think many others, privilege has a negative connotation to it. The speaker, however, did not talk about how privilege was bad and that if you were someone born with many privileges you should be ashamed, but instead discussed how people can not control their privilege. It is something that is not earned. One is born a mixture of privileges, and privilege ultimately has a role in societal powers. The speaker did talk about how that privilege can be abused, and that this typically hurts the minoritized groups in a society. Diversity conversations are to have often, because people do not want to offend others or they feel uncomfortable discussing differences between people, but I think these conversations are important to have in order to bring awareness to privileges and help people become better at the inclusion aspect of diversity and inclusion.

On a daily basis I do not often see privilege taking a huge role in people’s lives and interactions here at Ohio State, because of how diverse campus is, people just get treated like people, but this could also be due to my lack of awareness (of which I am trying to improve). I think that diversity and inclusion does impact science, technology, math, and engineering a lot, especially when media and news brings up talks about the lack of women or diversified groups in engineering. There are millions of smart people out there by which the STEM fields could certainly benefit, and many people get turned away to due to prejudices and privileges in the system. Thankfully, there are lot of opportunities at Ohio State for inclusion for minoritized groups, not only in STEM, but as a whole campus. There are STEM groups such as SWE (Society of Women Engineers) that advocate for more women in engineering, the Student Life Multicultural Center that puts on events to promote inclusion, and countless student organizations and clubs that promote diversity, and more importantly inclusion. Ohio State does a good job of promoting these groups and services to build a happier and more inclusive campus.