Growing up in a small-town with a little under six thousand people, and coming from a high school with a barely over four hundred students, the prospect of attending a school where you wouldn’t know everybody’s name was truly exciting for me. So on Aug. 19, as I started my drive to Millikin University to start my adulthood, my excitement grew and grew.

Although my background made things difficult for me at the beginning of the semester, it got better. I did what I had been told to do by my older friends who attend college: I smiled and said hello to people, and eventually, it led to friends. However, I began to notice as time went on that my friendliness and acceptance of others was not a quality that certain others here possess.

Around our institution, gossip spreads like wildfire. Of course, this is going to happen in every single place of learning, but because Millikin is a small campus, the gossip tends to spread much more quickly. Almost every day, people come up to me telling intense, hurtful stories about what others have done and judging the person who the story is about.

Although Millikin is a diversity-driven environment, intolerance is still a major problem. Race and sexual discrimination occur on every college campus in America, but because we are so small, people feel more at home to express their barbaric views about others.

I recall a story I heard from two friends of mine who, when they were at a floor meeting, said that another resident on their floor wanted any gay people who lived on their floor to speak up about themselves. I’ve heard conversations from my friends of other races who expressed their contempt at those whom they have felt looked down upon them here

I have met various students who remarked about how small the campus is compared to the size of their high school. So to follow my train of thinking, if so many people see our school as being smaller than their high school, maybe that’s why they treat it as a high school.

Many students who attend this university need a reality check. Although we live in a far more intimate setting than the average college, it’s not an incentive to pick others apart for the things we don’t like about them. College is a time to practice living like an adult, which includes straying away from spreading gossip and hateful feelings about others’ backgrounds and lifestyles. If everyone took the initiative to understand that we need to grow up and act like we are living in the real world, the better the Big Blue experience would be for all of us.