This morning while advising students at Sycamore Advantage, it struck me that there were a lot of minorities in the room at the time, most all of them the fellow advisors. Half of the advisors are from SASC and the Open Preference program (Susan, Heather, and me) and the other half are from the College of Health and Human Performance as temporary help during this crazy advising season. Add one student who was there today and you&#039ve got quite a slew of minorities all in one room.

First we&#039ll start with ethnic minorities. The OP advisors are all white, but the HHP advisors are quite mixed. The guy is from Puerto Rico, one of the women is African American, and the other woman is a mix of Russian, Hispanic, Black and who knows what else. We&#039re missing Asian and Native American and some others, but for the most part that&#039s pretty diverse with a few minorities in there.

Next comes sexual orientation. I can&#039t vouch for everyone else, but I know that I&#039m bi and that the dude is gay. There&#039s two more minorities on the table.

Religion&#039s one I don&#039t know for most of them, but I know I&#039m an Atheist, quite a minority. It&#039s one of those &#034hidden&#034 classifications, but knowing that it was there, I knew that it was yet another minority represented. No one there was Amish, but I can&#039t vouch for Judaism. The only person who could be Muslim would be the guy &#039cause the other women don&#039t wear head scarves. Still, even just having one Atheist in the group is quite a minority as it is.

Oddly, while men are purported to be the majority in the world (by socio-economic and political standards), there were far more women than men with a ratio of 5:1. Go women minority!

Speaking of women, I don&#039t know that this counts as being in a minority or not (probably not because it&#039s totally natural), but one of the counselors is pregnant. That&#039s different, at least.

If we include one student who was there today in the mix of minorities, then we can include having a person who is legally blind. People with disabilities (physical ones, at any rate) are still minorities as far as I know, so that&#039s one more to the pile of minority madness. Who knows what other sorts of hidden minorities such as learning disabilities and dyslexia were in the room as well?

So this morning felt like Minority Central. It&#039s really quite a diverse bunch that we have accumulated over there. Minorities have always struck me as being very interesting in that I seem to run into them everywhere. Maybe it&#039s just that they seem to stick out and therefore are more noticeable, or maybe it&#039s because they really are everywhere but the social acceptance, understanding, or tolerance isn&#039t there. Whatever the case may be, it was just an observation on my part this morning. I thought I&#039d share it with y&#039all.