Reflective essay

My hometown is Geneseo, IL. In Geneseo, simply put, there isn’t much diversity. It’s a white dominated environment where, in fact, many people are very racist. I like to think of myself as a nice, caring, and empathetic person. So I thought I knew about diversity. Everyone who watched the movie, “The Freedom Writers” knows the ins and outs about diversity right? As weird as it sounds, this was my mentality in highschool.

I’ve come a long way in my experiences with diversity since those years. I started working as an engineering intern/student aide at the Rock Island Arsenal. This was the first real diversity I had encountered in my life. I was going to work with people from all different backrounds. I will return to my experiences with this job later, but first I want to talk about how basketball has helped me adapt and understand diversity as a whole.

I am a walk-on on the basketball team here at Bradley, One thing about being a first year walk on is that I’m trying to be accepted. I feel like I’m on the team but not really at the same time. Like I have the title, but I’m on the outside of the close nit group of scholarship players. So I seized the opportunity to mess around after practice with Walter Lemon. Walt is a freshmen on the team from inner city southside Chicago. His backround and mine are complete polar opposites. There was definite tension between us because of the disparity in our backrounds, but again, that’s why I was so excited to just mess around. We ended up playing 1 on 1, and needless to say, I got it handed to me. However, the more and more we played, our passion and love for the game became apparent to each other. He would continuously score on me, but every time I would get the ball, throw it back at him, and say, “lets go!”. I think I surprised him with my persistence, and proved to him how motivated and passionate I was about the game.

It was those aforementioned characteristics that ignited our friendship. It is those characteristics that ignited many people’s friendships on the team. This experience of being on the basketball team has showed me how people can be from very diverse backrounds, come together on shared goals and character traits, and form a team.

I will take this experience back with me to the Rock Island Arsenal, along with the many other influential experiences I’ve had, like this class, and use it to better my production as a member of an engineering team at the RIA by understanding that each person has his or her strengths and weaknesses. Being a diverse team helps if the team is able to utilize the individual’s strengths while limiting the impact of the weaknesses. Through the experiences I’ve had, and will have, I’ll have a better understanding of how to handle diversity in the workplace.