United Minorities Council takes a look at workplace diversity

Getting a job doesn’t need to be any more complicated than it already is. For minority students at Penn, however, issues of diversity and cultural awareness are an additional consideration on top of the standard struggles of networking, applying and interviewing for jobs.

In order to bring these issues to the front of people’s minds, the United Minorities Council hosted a panel discussion last night on Diversity in the Workplace, the third of six events to promote Unity Month.

On the panel, two Penn graduates — as well as Wharton senior Joivonnah Childs and 1993 Engineering graduate and Director of the Makuu Black Cultural Center Brian Peterson — discussed their experiences with diversity issues.

They began their discussion with personal anecdotes from their professional atmospheres, but the topics soon focused on Penn-specific issues of diversity.

“The thing I identified with most [in the discussion] was mentorship — having someone to look up to in a specific field,” said Stephen Ahn, vice chair of UMC and the discussion’s moderator.

Childs felt that this concern was particularly relevant to the racial diversity of Penn’s faculty. Throughout her four years at Penn, she said none of her classes had been taught by black professors.

Panelist Therese Parker, a 2012 Graduate School of Nursing graduate, noticed a similar trend during her undergraduate years at Penn.

“If you don’t have faculty that have the same background as you, you might not feel as comfortable talking to them,” she said.

Peterson cited other examples of how Penn could improve its encouragement of cultural awareness, such as strengthening the Cross-Cultural Analysis requirement for students in the College and encouraging students of all racial backgrounds to live in the Dubois College House. “For Penn, we do diversity, but sometimes we don’t do it well,” he said.

College senior Sandra Chung said the issues raised in the discussion struck a chord with her personal experiences with Penn as well. She has often heard students complaining about having TAs with foreign accents and implying that people with accents can’t be competent leaders.

But even though these attitudes may exist within the Penn community, College senior and UMC Co-Chair Lucia Xiong said Unity Month is an important resource to help combat them.

While it only lasted a week in past years, this year’s month-long initiative is a collaboration among the UMC and its 25 constituent student groups to “promote an intercultural community at Penn,” Ahn said.

Xiong added, “The ultimate goal is to make sure that people know that these obstacles can be overcome.”

Panelists and students proposed long-term solutions such as increasing intercultural communication, creating safe spaces for discussion and eliminating our racial stereotypes.

Those are neither quick nor easy fixes, but Childs believes that the essence of diversity is embracing one’s cultural heritage, not sacrificing it to be successful. “What’s great about being a person of color is there’s color in your personality; there’s color in your story,” she said.

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