Admission Essay: Oklahoma State University

đź“ŚCategory: Education, Higher Education
đź“ŚWords: 1010
đź“ŚPages: 4
đź“ŚPublished: 17 June 2022

Prior to taking this class I thought I had a solid grasp on the idea of sexuality and the several different facets of experience and subgroups that could affect someone’s experience in declaring their own sexuality and seeing and reacting to others. I grew up in New York City in a world where I was always exposed to others who might not have identified the same way as me, in a variety of different ways including race, gender and sexual orientation, so many of the topics that we addressed in class just simply didn’t occur to me as having been such controversial and debated topics until I heard class discussions and completed the readings where there were in depth conversations about some of the different kinds of stigmatization and adversity that was occurring in the world around me. One of the most eye-opening experiences happened for me within the first two weeks of class. When we watched and later spoke about, Sex(Ed): How Did You Learn About Sex?, I realized that while I knew about the general idea that the way schools teach sex education has evolved, I didn’t realize that it had so far to evolve to and in some places, still needs to evolve to. The conversation in class following our watching the documentary was also interesting to me. I realized that the sex-education I had received in my New York City public school was far more comprehensive and open to questions and conversation than the education that many of my peers had received. Interestingly, the same topic came up just a few weeks later in a different class I was taking, Introduction to Health Studies. The conversation that we had in our class and the knowledge that I had received from the video and hearing other people’s experiences became a crucial piece of my discussions about sex education in my other class. This was really the first time in my education that I could apply what I had learned in one class to a completely unrelated one, in the sense that it wasn’t the simple carrying over of a mathematical equation or a chemical on the periodic table, but actual conversation and ideas on a highly debated topic that has a real presence in society. Further, the idea of intersectionality and the way in which it plays into everyone’s lives in some capacity is a concept that simply isn’t addressed in mainstream media and conversation the way it should be, which is something that I only learned about because of this class. While there are conversations about gender, race, and sexuality and the different ways in which they connect, the idea that they all affect each other and create different nooks of oppression and privilege is an idea that isn’t given the time and consideration that it deserves in talking about systemic procedures and the way that it can help or hurt someone depending on the different pieces of their identity. The concept of intersectionality is one that I will continue to apply during and after my time at Dickinson.

More broadly, I think that having taken this class provided a unique opportunity to learn about the why of certain publicized reactions to things. There are so many opportunities in education to talk about the psychological reactions that people have or even with a more limited set of topics, biological reactions. The idea of cultural responses and society framing certain reactions and cultural norms that society just blindly follows because they are what is expected, isn’t necessarily an idea that has been addressed, at least in my education. I feel that if a topic along these lines had come up prior to this class, it was a surface level, quick conversation, and certainly didn’t require any real thought or analysis of the subject. With the presence of the discussion style classes and required reading journals, I do think that I was forced to look at smaller details that typically would have been missed on me, to fully understand the readings and topics we spoke about. At the beginning of the semester, I struggled with writing the reading journal posts because of the lack of structure and specific direction given for them. The concept of completing a reading and writing a reflection focusing in on one point addressed and not the entirety of the reading or movie, like a summary, was a challenge because of the conditioning I always received to identify the “big-picture”. Ultimately, over time writing the journal entries became easier and helped me to improve not only the ways in which I was thinking about the readings, but the way that I could articulate my thoughts about them as well.

Over the course of the class, I learned a lot about the synthesis of all the different nodes

of sexuality and the idea that concepts of sexuality, might not be what we typically view as being related to sexuality at all. Sexuality ties back into so many different things, and I feel that one of the overarching ideas of the class is the concept that sexuality really is everywhere and a part of everything. While I previously could have confidently said that I knew sexuality was tied into gender, identity, and popular culture, I didn’t realize how deeply ingrained it was into race and history as well. I also was aware of my own privileges being straight and white, but I didn’t realize the true ways it has benefited me in so many ways. While especially right now, with the potential of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, it is scary to be a woman, being white and straight creates certain corners of acceptance that others don’t have. I think taking this course has been such a rewarding experience that is so unique to a liberal-arts college experience. Having taken this class, I’ve improved actual skill sets including analysis, comprehension, and writing, but also, I’ve learned a bit more about history and the reasoning for why the United States, and more broadly the world, functions in the way it does. In addition, the ways in which really all aspects of identity are comingled, became so much clearer to me through taking this class and I have become so much more aware of the way different aspects of identity play into how people are treated and viewed. This is something that I not only will be aware of in the rest of my education, but when viewing the rest of the world and events that take place, as well.

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