The NAACP group at Bryn Mawr took six students to spend three days in New York participating in a leadership diversity conference. The conference took place from Nov. 18th to the 19th and was full of students and faculty from colleges all over the country. There were people there from Florida, Texas, Illinois, California and so many other states. Bryn Mawr students were there to represent Pennsylvania 🙂

The weekend was packed with interactive workshops and meaningful discussions. Being a posse student, it was really interesting to participate in similar activities, but with a different atmosphere and group. Bryn Mawr posse students and our guests (who we call posse plussers) spend a weekend in the spring of every year diving deep into a conversation about diversity, very similar to this conference. But the experience in this conference was very different than my first posse plus retreat last spring.

On the second day of the conference, I participated in the identity politics workshop, where we did the same activity Posse had us do last year. The activity involved different areas of the room having posters with an identity (ex: race, gender, sexuality, religion, (dis)ability). The facilitators would then read out statements and participants would move to the area/identity that we most strongly connected to that statement. It was interesting for me to do this because I realized my answers changed from last spring. This made me think about how much I’ve changed in half a year and how much Bryn Mawr has impacted me to see things differently.

I really enjoyed this conference, as it made me questions and deepen many of my beliefs/values. Opportunities like this are why I appreciate having come to Bryn Mawr.