Making her mark on the UMC and Penn

While the spring semester hasn't reached full throttle for most students, Darcy Richie already seems to have trouble finding enough time in the day to accomplish everything she wants to get done. Richie, a College junior and Urban Studies major, is the new chairwoman of the United Minorities Council, an umbrella organization of 15 minority groups on campus, as well as an active member of both the Penn and Philadelphia communities. "Sometimes I feel like I'm living the life of an adult, with four meetings a day," Richie says. "But in reality I'm still such a kid. I don't want to think about what I want to do with my life yet." As she plows around in her bag to find her day planner, Richie notes that she always keeps four essential items with her: the planner, a meeting book, a "Goings-On" book of various activities on and off campus, and an idea book for projects she hopes to begin. "People have given me so many opportunities that I feel I have to overextend myself to repay them," Richie says. "But I have a huge support network. My friends hold me back and push me forward." Friend and Engineering senior Julia Lee agrees. "Every year she has this list of things she wants to do, to get involved in," said Lee, who is president of the Asian Pacific Students Coalition and worked with Richie last year on the UMC board. "She wants to make her mark, to get her hands into everything and work with a variety of people. She is always reaching out to other fields." While involved in a variety of organizations on and off campus today, Richie says that she was not always interested in social reform. "I was on a totally different track," she says. She wanted to become a photographer and appreciated Philadelphia for the city's art scene. Originally from Birmingham, Mich., a suburb of Detroit, Richie attended a private high school which she described as an "isolated world." Though her parents were involved in politics and public education, Richie says she never considered these elements as central to her life. At the same time, however, she credits her parents in addition to her friends at Penn for getting her into minority issues. "In high school I always had diverse friends," Richie said. "Diversity was there but we never recognized it. If it is not highlighted, you don't learn from it." At Penn, Richie says "things kind of found me." Her friends, she says, made her become curious about things outside the "glass bubble." She began volunteering in the community, working at the Philadelphia Children's Alliance, the People's Emergency Center, and more recently at the ACLU and Campus Philly, a group that strives to retain college students in the city. She also became involved with organizations on campus like UMOJA, the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education, the Office of Student Life, various tutoring programs and more recently with Civic House. "Once I got exposed to the public education and economic discrepancies in Philadelphia, I had no choice but to get involved," Richie said. "I feel Penn has so much potential," she continues. "But it still has a long way to go." Richie cites the under-representation of minorities in Penn's student government as an example. According to her, because student government has access to various resources, under-representation excludes minority groups from easy access to those resources. In her capacity as UMC head this semester, Richie says she hopes to strengthen the relationship among its constituents and with other campus organizations, as well as to debate and address contentious issues such as affirmative action and relations with Philadelphia and Penn Police. She also hopes to work on projects such as a business/University public education collaborative endowment project and an Ivy conference on progressive policies, an area where Richie feels Penn is particularly lacking. One of the projects Richie is particularly passionate about is increasing exposure to the myriad of different groups on campus. "The normal Penn student comes to Penn and is automatically, and unfairly, put in this box, which they stay in for four years," Richie says. "That needs to change." To combat this phenomenon, Richie says she is currently working on developing an Inter-community Exchange Project to institute workshops conducted through the college houses as a means of exposing incoming freshman to all communities at Penn, not just minority groups. "My main goal is that the typical Penn student doesn't enter the world as isolated as Penn can let them be," Richie says. "There's a whole world just one block away that they don't see. "There is a natural tie to being exposed in our little world and being curious about the outside world," she adds. On a personal level, Richie notes that her other plans for this semester include volunteering at a women's shelter and getting more involved with the Penn Women's Center, because, somewhere along the way, "I forgot that I was also a woman," she says. "Penn is busting at the seams with talented leaders," said Sean Vereen, program coordinator at Makuu, the black student cultural center for which Richie has implemented and participated in programs. "But it is the rare student who through all that the campus throws at them keeps a faith in a community and in our collective ability to make it better. Darcy is one of those rare students." "I'm 100 percent in love with Penn and 100 percent in love with Philadelphia," Richie says. And it shows.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.