Why I applied to UAlbany as a diverse student
By Naomi Clause UA’25 and Jim Stellar
I came here to UAlbany from Brooklyn because of diversity. I never went to a school in Brooklyn that was not homogeneous, in my case all African American, and I lived in a uniform neighborhood. Here at UAlbany I found a different atmosphere, an environment with many different cultures.
This is a bit unusual as we think of New York City as being so diverse and everywhere. So what was your very first impression when you got to the campus for the first time?
I was nervous and excited, but I found that I was living with people from a different ethnic group. And I figured by sharing facilities and living together we would bond and become friends. I had never experienced this kind of diversity. Given that I want to become a forensic psychologist I felt that I needed to be familiar with every type of race and culture so that I would know how to conduct myself to be, eventually, a successful professional.
So tell me why do you think diversity is important to know how to conduct yourself professionally? And by the way, I agree.
Diversity is crucial in professional settings because it directly impacts communication, teamwork, and overall workplace dynamics. Many workplaces have ethical guidelines emphasizing respect and change. Being knowledgeable about diversity goes with these standards and helps maintain a respectful work environment. For example, I want to be a forensic psychologist (and I do) which causes me to be in a very diverse environment and my interaction with diverse clients, understanding their perspectives allows for stronger relationships and better service for them.
You said you came to UAlbany in the first place to experience diversity given your homogeneous high school. But now you are talking about your profession. Can you say what diversity brings to the profession?
Yes, I came to UAlbany and I learned, for example, about Indian culture. I also interacted with other cultures that gave me a broader view about people in general.
Great. Now how was this past summer on your internship?
I spent my summer at the NYPD office in District 32 where I am doing basic administrative work. My hope is that this experience will prepare me to start in the fall in the NY State District Attorney’s Office in Albany.
Great again. Now how do you see these experiences fitting with your career ambitions?
Working at the District Attorney’s Office and NYPD’s 32nd Precinct aligns very well with my goal of becoming a forensic psychologist because both environments give you direct exposure to the criminal justice system. I will get exposure to seeing how cases are prosecuted, how evidence is gathered and evaluated and how defendants’ mental states can affect trial outcomes. DAs often work with forensic psychologists or mental health professionals to understand the defendant’s mental states and criminal behavior. This will help me gain insight into how psychologists are used in building or defending a case and how they play a very crucial role in cases. Working at the NYPD precinct I will be around officers responding to first hand crimes and interviewing suspects and seeing behavior in high stress or crisis moments will be essential in understanding criminal behavior. Overall I’m gaining hands-on experience and will help me with career connections for helping me become a future forensic psychologist.
Good that you are getting hands-on experience. Now tell me why that matters to someone who admittedly came to UAlbany because of its diversity.
As stated, that is one of the main reasons why I came to UAlbany. I wanted to put myself in this environment where difference is the norm, where every interaction demands adaptability, empathy, and awareness. To me, that is a critical form of learning, seeing and doing everything in person especially because you are seeing and getting first hand experience. You can memorize terms from a lecture and study all you want but until you sit down with someone whose worldview challenges yours, you don’t really know people. And if you don’t know people, you don’t know psychology.
Psychology is about understanding people. While it requires study and reading, what truly deepens that knowledge are everyday interactions and first-hand experiences. Engaging with different situations allows you to put what you’ve learned into practice and see it unfold in real life. Books and lectures provide the foundation, but it is the real-world, first-hand experiences that bring those lessons to life.
What we both see here in this blog is the similarity of direct experience with work and of direct experience with diversity on a campus (As NC writes about UAlbany “I am living inside a classroom that never ends.”). We write about the both in this blog series, but not about linking them like this blog post.
We also write about how the intermediate levels of the brain (e.g. the limbic system and emotions) are strongly educated by this direct experience. So is the cognitive system (the neocortex which does your planning and symbolic logic, e.g. language), but that education really is abstract. For example, one can read the studies from psychology and sociology about stereotype threat, but remain un-educated about the experience of that different group at a gut-level. Now, if you come and live and work in a diverse environment, like UAlbany, one gets tons of experiences of diversity through food, friends, and activities in and out of the classroom … as NC wrote about.
This is the same limbic system education that you get when you show up at the workplace and decide you like it (or not) and this is important to your career for which you are studying in your college major. The bottom line here is that most people cannot easily think their way cognitively into feeling it with emotions. You have to be there. Then you can do it about the career or about diversity.
