I want to start out by stating that I am absolutely head over heels in love with Indiana. Frankly – who wouldn’t be? Between our breathtaking campus, amazing sports teams, and overwhelming school spirit, the only people who could deny that IU is amazing would have to be from Purdue. I think the solitary thing that all 35,000 undergraduates can agree on is our obsession with this B-Town bubble. If you are reading this, as a fellow Indiana student, I am sure you are nodding your head and smiling because you couldn’t agree more. But I left out one detail about myself that I can no longer hide. I now define myself as a Hoosier, the truth is: I am from the East Coast.
Born and raised in Philadelphia, I can honestly say that Indiana University is the last place I would have expected to go to college. I applied to ten schools, nine within a four-hour radius of my house, and somehow I ended up in Bloomington, Indiana. From the second I walked through the Sample Gates, I was smitten with Indiana. I could not have handpicked a better fit for college, and I knew that going to IU was the ONLY option. I withdrew my Syracuse and Delaware applications the second I got home, and sent in my enrollment deposit.
A few months later it was time for orientation. I could not be more apprehensive and excited to go back to my future school for the weekend. The morning of orientation, my parents and I were walking around campus and trying to find what building we were supposed to be in. A girl with a crimson Indiana Tee greeted us with a friendly smile and offered to help us find where to go. We started making small talk and she said that she was a student at Indiana helping out with orientation. She asked me where I was from and with a huge smile I replied, “Philly!” With a look of disgust she literally stopped walking, smirked at me, and moved on to the family walking behind us. This was my first encounter with someone from Indiana who was, to say the least, not exactly a fan of the East Coast. So much for Hoosier Hospitality…
While I was upset about how this girl treated me, I still managed to have an amazing time at orientation. However, I couldn’t get the image of that girl’s smirk out of my head. I have never felt insecure about Philadelphia before and I was slowly beginning to realize that this may become a reoccurrence at my future at IU.
I was right. From the moment I got to school, I could sense the judgment I received from many mid-western and other west coast people when I said that I was from Philadelphia. During Welcome Week, the floor of my dorm had a meeting. We had an icebreaker activity, which consisted of stating your name and where you were from. By the time I introduced myself, I felt like I was the only person not from Chicago or Indiana. For the first time in my entire life, I said my hometown with hesitation.
Of course when my peers on my floor got to know me, they began to realize that I was not the “typical” East Coaster. They accept me now for who I am, and I have developed many friendships with people from the west coast. I also have many friends from the east coast. But I still can’t shake the judgment that I, and many of my friends, continue to receive from something as simple as what Coast we grew up on. I actually have one friend that when asked where she is from, she responds, “Long Island… well, not “that” Long Island.”
I cannot deny the swagger of the east coast crowd at Indiana. We tend to stick out, with our dark hair and the way we dress. In retrospect of all of the students at Indiana – we are a minority, yet I feel like I meet another New Jersey or New Yorker on a regular basis. The East Coast people seek to find each other, and we do. But I believe that the preconceived notions that are formed about the east vs. the west have created this divide. Are some of the East Coast people mean? Yes. Are some of the West Coast people mean? Yes. So why does the East Coast get such a bad rep?
I think that the some members of the student body need to stop looking at people as east or west, and instead: mean or nice. If you are from the west coast and constantly judging the east coast people without getting to know them, how does that make you any better than the people you claim to hate?
We are all guilty of making judgments. You can meet someone and within the first few minutes decide how you feel about the person. I believe that Stephen Chbosky said it the best in his novel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, when he wrote: “I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we’ll never know most of them. But even if we don’t have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there.”
I did not choose to be from Philadelphia, but I chose to be a Hoosier. For that matter – we all chose to be Hoosiers. So why should anyone be judged on what coast they are from? Where I am from has made me into the person that I am today, and I will never again hesitate to say I am from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.