Coming to Temple taught me to be accepting of anyone and everyone

The city of Philadelphia has – not even exaggerating – 10 times the amount of people than my hometown. Temple itself has more than twice as many people.

To say that I went through a bit of culture shock upon coming here is a huge understatement. As if the sheer number of people wasn’t enough, I was coming to a school famous for it’s incredibly diverse student population. So famous, in fact, that we’ve come to be known around these parts as the one, the only: Diversity University.

There I was on move-in day, your average starry-eyed freshman from a little town in New Hampshire, about to be thrown into the cultural melting pot that is Temple University. Despite how daunting this seemed in my first few weeks here, I quickly grew accustomed to this new lifestyle and even began to start to feel more and more comfortable here in Philly.

For those of you who don’t know, we’re running pretty low on diversity in little old Goffstown, New Hampshire. I think my high school was like 99 percent middle class kids from working class, blue collar white folks.

We had a few different nationalities sprinkled in, but nowhere near enough to give us even a hint of how people other than white Americans lived. Think of the dome in the Simpson’s Movie -that’s how disconnected Goffstown felt from the rest of America.

We don’t live in the Stone Age so the internet is still a thing up there, but seeing a different culture on a screen provides maybe only 2 percent of the same experience as actually living it.

Those of us who are plugged in get the benefit of being pretty open minded to other people and their beliefs, but the people who live a more simple life (and there’s a lot of them in New Hampshire) have some pretty conservative, old-fashioned views.

At a cookout full of friends and family I heard someone yell, “Thank god for that Trump guy, he’s the only sane one in this whole race!” After I cleaned up some of my vomit, I looked over and people were clinking Bud Light bottles in cheers – all the while I was, unsurprisingly, at a loss for words.

Now that you know where I was coming from, imagine hopping on a plane coming from there and an hour later landing at Philadelphia International en route to Diversity University. I knew right from the start that I’d have to let go of all my preconceived notions and stereotypes I’d picked up from home and start with a clean slate – so that’s what I did.

I’ve found that this once fear-inducing lifestyle change has turned out to be one of the biggest added benefits for me here at Temple. On top of constantly being around people with different beliefs, traditions, foods and lifestyles – and the inherent life lessons that come from being open to these things – is the fact that Temple also builds a lot of this into the curriculum.

Gen-eds in race relations, world music, even the dreaded Mosaics all provide a look into how people from around the world live. The mixture of taking classes, living with and around people of different races and nationalities and trying foods from all over the world comes together in Philly.

Sure, not everyone gets along perfectly – the locals hate our drunken tirades, some groups don’t like other groups, etc. – but at the end of the day we all co-exist and constantly learn from each other.

Temple has done a great job in recognizing this often overlooked aspect of how going to college in a big city can help students (like me) learn to be more open-minded and accepting of anyone and everyone.

My personal experience of coming from a one-dimensional place like New Hampshire is perhaps more extreme than most, but students coming from the suburbs of Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware – or anywhere really – undoubtedly share some similar feelings. For those of you who do, as well as those of you who are considering or already committed to Temple, I urge you to keep an open mind and learn from all of these rich cultures.

Become friends with people who are different than you, try new foods and really just go out and experience all of what Diversity University has to offer.