World Peace Anyone?

McDaniel College has so many amazing opportunities, and I have had the pleasure of being part of the inaugural group of the Global Fellows Program. What is Global Fellows you may ask? It is best group on campus if you ask me. It is for people who are concerned with our world on an international level. It is about thinking outside of only how we live and considering other ways of life, cultures, and ideas that contribute to humanity as a whole. It is much more than being a globally minded person. It is about being globally involved. The Global Fellows Program is a really awesome group of people who all have a similar interest: improving the world in some way. I know plenty of people who are interested in global health, teaching, politics, etc. All majors are welcome because we want people to have a diverse variety of interests in order to have great group discussions.

We have had some really good conversations at our events. We did a fun social exercise where we pretended to be people from different cultures, and then we tried to communicate with each other to exchange goods. It was one of the most challenging things to try to understand people so different from my assigned culture. Through reflecting we learned about how your own culture baggage (meaning where you are coming from and everything you know), can make it hard to communicate with others. However, this exercise showed how important how important cultural understanding is. It was cool to see how people from the more aggressive culture tried to understand the less aggressive culture’s ways. Some people even changed their speech patterns and prose to fit the other cultures. It really went to show that if you as a person are willing to try and adapt and learn, it will benefit you in any situation regardless of language barriers or cultures. All we need is to begin the road to understanding in order to find harmony amongst all of the differences.

This is just one example of the many awesome things to come from the Global Fellows Program. We have events where we socialize with our McDaniel Community as well as Colloquiums where we invite speakers to speak about global topics in their respective fields. We are continuing on our quest to learn more about the world as well as help the world by becoming global minded and globally involved citizens. We have yet to achieve world peace, but at the rate we are going, you never know.