Despite all of this, I am hesitant to say that AU has one strongly linked community. This may be because I am only a quarter of the way through of my freshman year or because I am reluctant to believe that any place has one strongly linked community. In my opinion, communities are more closely related to close groups of families and friends than they are to random groups of people who happened to end up in the same location because they have a couple of random similarities. When I think about what I miss about home, I usually think about my family and my friends. I am not at all embarrassed to admit that there has not been one instance in my time away from home that I have thought, "Gee, I really miss the random festivals that occurred in my town because a couple of people had interests in putting together a community." This is similar to the way that I see communities on campus. I do not believe that there is one unified community on campus, but instead I think that there are many smaller communities made up of groups of friends who mutually care about and support each other. To me, this does not mean that the people here are not proud to be part of American University, it just means that being part of a group does not necessarily make it a community.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
AU's Community
Of course, on first thought, it is easy to assume that AU is community. We are a group of people with some things in common. Everyone here clearly has something in common because we all chose to be part of the same school. It would be easy to assume that because of this, we are all strongly linked in the type of community that Joe Gorman would be proud of. Looking around the campus, there are many common events. Things that many people do together. People seem to have similar ideals and tastes.
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Yesterday, when we first got the blog question I would have agreed with you stance on AU not being one, unified community. However, after thinking about the question and writing my response, I realized that AU is a community not because we share a ton of things in common, but because we came here as a result of being drawn to AU's community, without even knowing it. We were selected to come here and then we decided that we did want to come here, and in doing so we became a part of the AU community. We couldn't come to AU solely by saying so, but rather we had to apply, and through this process AU is able to exclude others and to include the people who they think will be able to continue the community that has been created here.
ReplyDeleteBelle,
ReplyDeleteYou state that you feel as if AU does not have a close-knit community. I have to say that a part of me agrees with you, sometimes it feels as if "community" in this school only happens between friends and acquaintances. However, do you think that maybe part of the reason for AU not being such a close community, has to be for the fact that we are all college students? By this, I mean that most college students are learning to be on their own, therefore gaining a sense of independence. Do you think that maybe this new-found sense of independence is causing AU to not be a close community?
I do agree with aspects of both of these comments. Like you say Miranda, to a certain extent, it is clear that all the students here have something in common because we were all drawn to AU. At the same time, though, it is very difficult to see any one unified community here. How can a community be made up of people who,for the most part, do not know everyone's name and do not really care about each other. I also think Chips&salsa brings up a very good point. The fact that everyone here is focused on becoming independent and for this reason, mainly focusing on him or herself does probably have a major impact on the state of the community. We are all trying to find out who we are and what we want to do in our lives. Most of us probably are not thinking about the best way to bring random people together.
ReplyDeleteDespite what I said in my blog - thinking about it, I think that yes, while we are all striving to be "independent" and what not right now...when we graduate, we will wholly view ourselves as part of the AU community as an alumni. We will become excited if we meet a fellow graduate who maybe applies for a job or something in our place of work etc.
ReplyDeleteI personally think it is awesome to claim a connection to David Gregory, host of Meet The Press, who is an AU alumni. I actually met him and he was really excited to hear I was considering AU (as I hadn't fully decided at the time) Anyway, it's awesome to feel part of a large community with many intelligent, powerful people who I can benefit from...alumni connections are awesome =]