Last semester I was trying to get a senior apartment with one of my friends but we were missing two other girls to be eligible to get one. I found out that two of my friends, one American and the other foreign, were looking for roommates. I told my American friend that I found somebody she could live with. At first she got super excited but then I told her where my friend was from, and her excitement quickly disappeared. The funny thing is that my other friend had the same reaction, she told me that they were “too different” to live together even though they didn’t know each other.

But what if they were not as different as they thought? What if this set of ideas about each other was wrong?

Unfortunately, they will never know.

Everybody gets some kind of stereotype. It will depend on your age, your race, your social group, pretty much anything, but it seems that stereotyping comes naturally.  

I have to admit, I had a lot of stereotypes about the U.S. before coming here. My research about colleges in the United States consisted of a movie marathon – American Pie, Mean Girls (I know that is high school but it was close enough) and Animal House. Dumb football players who are full of themselves, cheerleaders who are not the brightest, the nerds of science clubs, and frat boys, the list goes on and on. 

Now, it is my turn. 

I am a Latin American student and I have been studying for three years in a tiny conservative town in northeast Ohio, so you get the picture.  

What is my stereotype? People assume that I am Mexican or Brazilian and I am neither. They are truly surprised when I say that I hate spicy food and that I do not eat tacos every day. People probably think that I celebrated my quinciañero dancing to the rhythm of a mariachi band while wearing a sombrero. And of course that tequila is my favorite drink (well, that one is actually the truth).

Sadly, I do not have enough fingers to count how many times I have heard comments like this or how many times I have seen people writing others off based on what they think they know about other cultures. 

For example, one time one of my American friends came and sat down at convo with my friends and me. Indeed, she was the only American person sitting with us and I couldn’t help but to overhear somebody asking why she was sitting down at the “international” table. 

Sure! I completely understand your comment! What circumstances made her sit with people from other countries, like what was on her mind right?

I attended a stereotype forum the other day and there was a Saudi Arabian student, who had a U.S roommate. The Saudi Arabian student was telling us how his roommate told him, for several nights, how good he was with knives. While he was telling us this story, I could not understand where this knife thing was coming from, at the end of his story the guy said something along these lines; that his roommate was trying to make him understand that if he tried to hurt him, he would be able to fight back. 

I was laughing at first when he said that. It seemed ridiculous to me because this Saudi Arabian student was very friendly and I could not ignore his warm and sincere smile. I could be wrong, but how far can people’s ignorance go? A feeling of disappointment in students was going through my whole body.

For a while, I was really frustrated and mad at people. How they can be so closed minded and actually think that they know something about other cultures without any outside knowledge. I have always asked myself “Why does this happen?” 

Then one day, a tall blond guy named Nick gave me the answer that I was desperately looking for. Nick and I had a class together and he sat next to me. It was half way through the semester and we had never talked.  After talking, we realized that both us did terrible on an exam. 

He became my friend and one time I asked him why he never talked to me before. He answered that he was afraid of me. I am 5’ 2” and the average age that people give me is probably 18. But he was talking about how he was intimidated because I was different. 

That day, my faith in humanity came back. The answer was so simple, fear. People are scared of what they don’t know or what is different to them. And this goes two ways; American students are scared as well as foreign students. I was scared when I just came to the United States so I stayed closer to the people like me. 

I wish I had a different set of mind when I just came and I wish people could realized that just because we do not look alike, maybe we eat different food or listen to different types of music, but there has to be something that unifies us. 

This column is for those students who rather sit down at the corner of a room than sitting next to a foreign student, to the students who make fun of an international person giving a presentation. 

This column goes to the international students who stick with the people of their same countries. I am talking to those students who are afraid of getting to know something different from them.