“They don’t come to us. I want to be in a sorority, but they assume I don’t want to be in there because they’re all white. I feel like they lose out.”

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Transcript for Missing Out

Sometimes I feel that a lot of organizations do not know how to deal with diversity and I feel that they miss an opportunity to get a lot of minority students to be involved with their groups because they don’t talk to us. A lot of times people wanna talk about Greek life and why African Americans and Latinos aren’t in Greek life, but they don’t come to us, they don’t market to us about why we should join their groups even though African Americans and Latinos have their own historic fraternities and sororities that’s due to historical content. I think that they should still market to us. I think they should market to us even more because a lot of African Americans and Latinos don’t even want to be in the historical sororities and fraternities.

Personally, like I don’t, I just want to, you know that’s not my hang up. I mean I want to be in a sorority. I would love for the sorority girls, you know to come talk to me because I want to be in a sorority, but they assume that I don’t want to be in there because they’re all white or you know, they’re not like me or they know that we have our own and I guess they expect that if we want to be in a sorority we want to be in those. I feel that they lose out. There’s so many of us here.

Currently two of my friends, we’re all black, and we’re considering being in a sorority next year, and no one comes up to us, and we sit around campus, we saw the whole bid thing, they don’t try to get at us. We’re not different human beings. We’re all similar human beings; we just have different skin tones.

I feel that a lot of times they should do something special to market the diverse students because we come here and we feel lost, we’re looking for a community, and we don’t know where to go. A lot of us don’t want to be forced to just be in the Black Student Organization, or forced to be in the Latino Group, or the Asian Group. We’d like to be in other organizations like the engineering program, or something like that, we’d loved to be in there, but people don’t come to us, we feel like we aren’t welcome.

I think a lot of times you can’t change people and I don’t think that’s the goal is to just change students. Students come from a lot of places, they’re eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, they’re basically set in their ways. I mean, change can come, but that’s not the goal. I think that should be a university thing. I think that the university should develop programs that help minority students get involved on campus. I think that they should help us enjoy Valpo. Give us our experience. If the university gets involved we’ll feel like the school cares. We feel that if the school cares, then that will give us an extra ‘umf’ to stay here because then despite of how people feel, my university cares, they want me to be here. You know, they’re gonna want, you know, find the funds or find the activities that are going to make my experience here. Then there will be a sense of community and then students will stay, they won’t run. A lot of students who leave they don’t feel like they’re anything here for them.