I did not realize how lucky I was until I reached Carlisle. I understand now that attending Dickinson College means being one of the privileged young men and women, who decided to live, laugh and even cry together for a single and noble cause: Engage the World. As a UWC alumnus, this is an opportunity for me to fully harness the ideals of international understanding I picked up in Italy across the last two years.

Dickinson also impressed me with its colorful extracurricular activities. Talking about clubs, they say here: “Name it and we will make it” just to show that it is always possible to find at Dickinson people who are willing to share your noble ideals. I did not expect, either, that there was a small present waiting for me here on campus. Being passionate for the martial arts, I was sad about the idea that I would no longer be able to practice. But I found out that someone happened to name the “Karate Club” last year and someone made it. Now there is a martial art school on campus free of charge for all Dickinson Students who are interested. In that, I find Dickinson College unique and I, very lucky.

A Fantabulous Dickinson Moment

As a senior at the United World College of the Adriatic I was looking for a College that will give me the opportunity to enhance and promote the ideals of international understanding. By the end of my first semester at Dickinson I realized that I made the perfect choice.

My freshman seminar was entitled “Education and Democracy.” It was one of the most enriching courses I have ever taken. I learned an awful lot about the American society in general and one of its core values hence democracy in particular. One of the most significant moments of my intellectual life happened when my classmates and I almost drowned in a cultural shockwave. After we read Savage Inequalities of Jonathan Kozol, Professor Landauer raised the following question: What is our community? In other words do we have to worry about the “others”? If yes who are the “others?” Are they people in our family, in our county, state, country or even in the entire world? We exchanged a few interesting contentions before one of us suddenly wondered why do we have to worry about “the others”. Instead of condemning this question I welcomed it and tried to give the best response I could at that time. My answer was simple and based on the following theory: Inequality brings envy. Envy in turns leads to hatred and the ultimate outcome of the latter is violence that may hit any of us at anytime. I backed this idea with the example of the conflict in the Middle East having some impacts on the 9/11 whose corollaries included a fall in the major stock markets around the world. This is just to show how small and interconnected the world is. I was proud and happy in the end that I changed the mind of a classmate who may change that of a sibling, a friend or even children over a crucial point about world peace.

After this Dickinson moment our mission as international students became clear to me: we ought to be ambassadors striving to promote understanding between different cultures and to turn the divergence between them into potential gains. It did not take me long to realize that Dickinson stands firmly for that.

-Moustapha Minte, Senegal,
former United World College of the Adriatic Student,
current Davis UWC Scholar & Dickinsonian Class of 2008