I recently received a blitz from DAHP. DAHP is an acronym for the Dartmouth Association for Health Care Professionals. Immediately I thought, "Dartmouth already has a pre-medical society, Nathan Smith." I continued reading and learned that DHAP "focuses primarily on minority students interested in the sciences and/or a medical career."
The previous day I received a blitz informing me that several minority perspectives were coming this weekend and the admissions office was in desperate need of minority hosts for them. I blitzed back volunteering to host and inquired why they felt they needed minority hosts. The replier informed me that it was standard protocol, but I never received a prospective to host.
I'm going to step out on a limb and refer to both these situations as self segregation, starting with DHAP. Dartmouth already has a well-established pre-medical society. Granted minority students may have different interests and needs from a pre-medical society, but does that constitute a need for a completely new society? I think not. The purpose of DHAP is to provide support for students of color, as this purpose can and should be met through the Nathan Smith Society.
Most perspectives only spend one night and two days at Hanover. If the admissions office primarily exposes these perspectives to minority students, who do you think they will befriend come freshman fall? It might even give some students a complex as to why we were admitted to Dartmouth, was it because of a box we checked off on our application or because of our academic credentials and personal character?
Grouping minorities together gives us a feeling of being innately different from others. Being born in Bogota, Colombia, gives me unique characteristics, but I do not believe there are enough things about me that are different to place me into a group separate from those born in the United States.
I, like all other students at Dartmouth, came to learn. Learn not only from teachers and books, but from the other 4,000 plus students around me. But how are we to learn from each other if we are constantly being separated into different groups?
Having a minority pre-med society and hosting minorities with the like alienates "non-minorities" from the "minorities." Misunderstanding and prejudice are unfortunate by-products of this alienation. So, we must choose between the benefits of separating ourselves into groups and the costs. I believe alienation and its by-products are too much to pay.
