Austin Rocks

Introduction
There’s always something to do in Austin especially as a college student. This is the perfect city to me: you’ve got the best of both worlds as far as like the big city kind of feel, you have enough of that and then you have kind of like a real small intimate kind of feeling too whereas like Dallas is so huge.

Campus Life and Social Life
I’m involved in a fraternity now. That’s basically the way I handle the situation by just getting involved and getting to know Black students. Because you’re not going to meet them in your class here. My only advice would be to get involved on campus. There’s a lot of organizations for everybody. You know, Latino’s, African-Americans, you can find a group for everything and if you can’t find one then you can definitely go out and start your own group that you want to be a part of that you think the campus should have but isn’t here, you can start one. If you’re Asian, you’re walking with Asians, you hang around Asians, you’re in Asian groups, there’s Asian fraternities, if you’re Black, it’s the exact same thing. If you’re white, it’s the exact same thing. It’s basically like a really segregated campus. Advertisement
Academics
Because it’s such a large campus, you’re not going to have that kind of, the same learning experience as students on smaller campuses as far as like, you’re not going to get a lot of one on one time with your professors. It can be a little intimidating to ask questions in a class of 500 students. It can be a little intimidating to be in a class of 500 students.

Student Body
One good thing, I guess about being a minority at a school this big, that’s a predominantly White campus is, I guess I do kind of stand out. That’s probably not the case with black students as much because we definitely make up such a small percentage of students here. A culture shock; I came from a minority majority campus back in Dallas and so I was used to being around other Black students, you know Latino students and everything like that and I get to campus here and I’m the only Black person in the class. And so that can be kind of intimidating I guess at some points, but you just get kind of used to it. And the thing that I did to kind of help find a comfort zone here is just get involved on campus, you know finding other Black students in different organizations.

In Closing...
I don’t think the campus is overtly racist or anything like that, but it’s just not a very diverse campus as far as the classrooms aren’t very diverse, the faculty is not very diverse, it’s just mainly White. I don’t think the staff in general here at all is very diverse. Like I haven’t noticed in my 3 years here an attempt to change things. And it’s been here since I came here in 2002 and now it’s 2005 and you know, things are basically the same. We don’t do recruitment, I know basically that’s what white fraternities and sororities do, they kind of recruit students, we don’t recruit people, if you’re interested you come to us and you let us know you want to be part of the organization.