Letter From the Editor: diversity
Los Angeles is an incredibly diverse city. People from all over the United States and all over the world come here for a host of different reasons. The perception outside California is that people come here mainly for one thing: to work in the movie industry. But this is an incredibly myopic point of view. Once somebody gets here, they quickly realize there’s much more here than show business. There are fantastic schools, a thriving tech and startup industry and a dense enough population to support businesses of all kinds. This diversity extends far beyond just professions and career goals and into ethnicities, religions and sexual preferences. For someone coming from parts of the country with less variety, this can lead to culture shock.
For myself, coming from an area just outside of Detroit, I experienced some culture shock when I arrived. With my hometown being mostly homogenous, it took a while to adjust to Los Angeles. But once I got used to it, it was a refreshing reprieve from the monotony of the suburban Midwest.
The diversity opens up entirely new worlds of ideas and perspectives that can be of great benefit to a young, creative mind trying to figure out exactly what the hell is happening on this planet. Seeing that there are more than just a couple choices when it comes to choosing your path in life makes the world feel much bigger than one could imagine and, at the same time, very small when you find shared beliefs between you and somebody from halfway across the earth.
This week’s issue reflects that diversity as the stories cover wildly different subjects. The theme of this issue is that there is no theme, not just because I hate themed content, but because the mix of people we have on this staff all have different things on their minds.
Our cover story touches on the diversity in genders, gender identities and sexual preferences. For myself and other heteronormative people, it can be difficult to get a grasp on the wide array of labels when it comes to those subjects. As our Opinion Editor Grace Gardner found, there are more than 40 different labels available for sexual preference and gender identification, and these can get pretty specific, with many of them overlapping. Grace attempts to break them all down and present them in a comprehensive and digestible manner.
News Editor Adam Thomas updates the situation with the often overlooked empty space in the cafeteria where The Bread Factory used to be. Now empty for over two years, the school will look to open it up for bidding this summer, but only if the bidding businesses meet certain criteria.
Staff writers and international students Daniella Barhanna and Julia Westman look to expose the lack of complete information provided in the counseling given to international students that may be costing them a lot of money as well as points on their GPA. Difficult math classes and another course with a hazy requirement status can make the move to Southern California more difficult than it needs to be for many students.
In A&E, Jacob Hirsohn profiles SMC’s Opera Club, highlighting an art that seems to be getting more and more obscure as time goes on. You rarely see it embraced by the younger generations, but as you’ll see in Jake’s piece, a young group of students at SMC have taken it upon themselves to keep the art form alive by performing whenever they get the chance. He takes us inside their meetings and inside the heads of the club’s members.
Prolific Staff Writer Ashleen Knutsen attended a talk at the SMC Planetarium where an astronomical historian broke down the mission of the Juno spacecraft as it aims to explore the mysterious world of Jupiter and its moons and figure out the composition of our solar system’s biggest planet. The giant spacecraft is set to reach Jupiter’s orbit on the 4th of July and will give scientists a glimpse into one more stellar enigma. She explains the importance behind this mission and why the information it yields can give us clues to our own origins.
In other news, it’s News Editor Adam Thomas’ birthday today, so I want to give him a printed happy birthday to commemorate the day he arrived in this world. It’s a day cursed by some, but the work he saves me from doing myself makes me fairly happy that it happened.
Aside from that, we are down to two issues left before the semester ends and the current version of the Corsair staff rides off into the sunset. We’ll do our best to leave something to savor going forward. Enjoy.