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Looking through the window of Boeing 777, with memories flashing back to the time when I first left Beijing and headed to the United States, I keep asking myself, “How have these three and half months passed?” Time flies faster than I have imagined. I can still clearly recall the day when I said goodbye to my sweet home, dragged my baggage to Beijing International Airport, and waited for a new life yet to come. And now, three and half months later, I’ve finished my first college semester in America.

At Brown University, I got the chance to meet all kinds of people with such different backgrounds that I was surprised we could even sit down and talk with one another. Once my friends and I tried to count how many languages people in our dorm speak, and we were surprised by the variety of languages—we have almost 20 languages. We not only have English, Spanish, and French, but also Arabic, Korean, and even Chinese with different dialects. In addition to the diversity of languages, everyone has his or her own unique upbringing and character. At Brown, I met people from America, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Cambodia, and many other foreign countries. I have friends who have very different interests, from computer science to sociology, and even theatre. When these students from all over the world sit down together and talk, I feel like that I was also traveling around the world through their interesting personal stories. It is through communicating with different people that I truly have understood the meaning of “diversity”.

Brown has shown me that the world is far beyond the threshold of my home. It has shown me how different people’s lives can be in different parts of the world, yet  we still can take classes, have lunch, hang out together, and understand one another’s differences. Every time when I stand on the 13th floor of Brown science library and overlook the city of Providence, I can see tiny houses and wonder if people living in those houses eat and sleep, learn and work, shed tears for sadness and hope for happiness just as the way I do. They are just ordinary people living in this world like you and me.

Seeing how different yet similar people are, I’ve become more understanding toward others and more independent. There’s no one set way of living. Because everyone is so different and lives his or her life individually, I don’t have to be afraid of being seen as “different”. I respect others’ differences and remain confident about being myself. I am part of such a diverse community at Brown, so I’ll just be myself and figure out my unique path in the future.

Sometimes, seeing the sky stretching beyond the horizon, I wonder why I am here in Providence thousands of miles away from my home, and I wonder where I will be in the future. I feel that the world is too big and myself too small. I’m very grateful to Brown, because here I got the chance to see how big the world is, how small I am, yet how a meaningful and amazing life an ordinary person can live.

Now the plane has just taken off, and my experience at Brown temporarily draws to an end. I’m excited to go back to my sweet home where I was born and raised, but now I indeed have two homes, one in Beijing and the other one at Brown. Beijing is my home because I was born and raised there, because my families and friends with whom I have strong emotional ties are all there. I share a lot of similarities with them. We all speak Chinese, eat Chinese food, and hold similar cultural identities. However, over the past few months, Brown has become my new home. It’s also because I have friends and emotional ties there. But these “ties” are different. It is the difference and understanding of each other that bond every “Brownie” together on College Hill, and create such a diverse community that I also regard as home.