The University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo celebrated Global Diversity Awareness Month in October by recognizing student art, performances and writings on what it means for the campus to be the most diverse four-year public university in the country.
Three students—Allison Dupre, Diamond Mundy and Jacinda Lee Angelsberg—who each won a $500 prize for their creative works, were recognized at an event celebrating UH Hilo’s diversity ranking in The Chronicle of Higher Education 2018 Almanac.
Dupre, a UH Hilo business major, won with “The Diversity Tree,” a mixed-media piece created with melted crayon wax, acrylic paint and lettering stickers that spell out a quotation by American entrepreneur Malcolm Forbes, “Diversity, the art of thinking independently together.”
“It represents everybody’s unique and individual personality, and since UH [Hilo] is one of the most diverse schools here in the U.S., it [represents] that we’re all together as a community, and we’re all here for one purpose, which is education, whether educating or being educated,” said Dupre. “It represents our community and where we come from and how we’re all here together.”
Angelsberg, who is earning baccalaureate degrees in psychology and Japanese, won with her poem, “Embracing the Rainbow of Diversity.” Go the the UH Hilo Stories article to read the poem.
Mundy won with her art piece that colorfully captures how “diversity means that despite everyone’s differences, we’re still able to come together and that’s why in my painting, I made everybody a different color, with different features, because no matter what, we’re still able to be friends.”
The event, organized by the UH Hilo diversity committee, encouraged students and faculty to take pride in their diversity, whether through culture, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious beliefs, hobbies or interests, as a way of learning from one another and creating a more unique experience at UH Hilo.
Read the full story at UH Hilo Stories.
—A UH Hilo Stories article written by Alyssa Mathews, a freshman at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo
