Being a new student at Clark Atlanta University was an extremely exciting experience. I have attended many enlightening, creative and interesting events since I’ve been a CAU student. I’ve been given the opportunity to meet many new people; all with very diverse backgrounds. I thought that going to a HBCU meant that i would be surrounded by people like myself. I was suprised to find that different regions of the country had African Americans who had different traditions, styles and dialects. Many of the people that I’ve met since being at CAU have southern accents; I found it both ironic and  comical when people told me that I had an accent because I’ve never heard anyone say that about myself before. I’ve also noticed that African Americans have different slang words depending on where they are from, for example people from Philadelphia (my state) will say the word jawn which is used to describe a particular thing, place or a type of girl ie. dirty jawn, bad jawn, ugly jawn. Southern people will use the word thang or shawty to experss the same thing. There are a lot of other slang words that we use that southern people don’t use but that was just one example.
Besides the social difference I’ve also noticed moral and ethical differences; people from the south focus heavily on traditions and black history whereas people from up north are constantly changing and moving at a fast pace– we don’t follow traditons like southern people do and we don’t focus heavily on Africn American History, we just learn it in school because we have to. Southern people are also very nice- I’m not saying that northerners are mean, but they aren’t as welcoming as southern people. Southern people go out of their way to make sure you are comfortable whereas northern people put themselves, their accomplishments, and their stability as their number one priority; they don’t have time to focus on others because everyone focuses most of their time on themselves.
Being a new student at Clark Atlant University has showed me the differnt sides of African Americans; i thought that we would all be they same but we are all very different. Learning this has made me proud to see that we are all very diverse.

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