Many of you who are coming from the Chicago Suburbs or other popular parts of the world will come to college with others from your high school or community. While it’s great to have the comfort of someone from home around, it’s important to get to know people from all of the different diverse backgrounds.

Dorms

One way to do this is to spend some time on your floor in the dorms since the people there will represent a conglomeration of different parts of the country and the university.

Clubs

Another way to do this is to get involved in different clubs and organizations around campus. For example, some of the organizations ACM, IEEE, WCS, HackIllinois, sport teams, Smashing Illini, etc.. These experiences give you the opportunity to broaden your horizons by getting to know about different majors and opportunities throughout the university and give you friends wherever you travel in the world. Most importantly, one of the biggest complaints about our generation’s use of social media as a news source is that we become entrenched in our own ideologies without a strong understanding of alternative viewpoints. This can be solved by interactions with people who view the world in a different way.