San Francisco State University

I think that San Francisco State has a great passion for promoting diversity within a community. A main memorable experience I have of SF State is first-time student day where they ask everyone about their past experiences and celebrate everyones differences.

My first year of college at San Francisco State was hands down the best year of my entire life. You meet so many people within the first month, because everyone is starting fresh. We would literally hang out with 30 different people each day. It was social explosion. I lived in the dormitories on campus and our floor was a tight knit family. I still see most of the friends I made freshmen year and all of my current room mates (I'm a Junior now) are people I met in the dorms. We would always go out together. Weather it be to go dancing, the beach, the park, parties, protests, dinner or music festivals, we would travel in one big, happy crowd. Our Resident adviser, who lived on our floor was like a big sister to us and I'm not just saying that. She didn't try to act like she was above us, not at all. Jenny looked out for us and worked very hard. The best part of living on campus was the couch wars we had with the other floors. Of course, we weren't aloud to take couches from lobbies, put them in the elevators bringing them to our own floor... but it turned into an enormous competition showing which floors had the most people lounging in their common areas! The 3rd floor's community was very strong and we usually won the couch wars by a landslide. It was so hilarious too because people would get quite emotional about it because when you take someones couch it can be considered a huge sign of disrespect. We would have girls scream at us and guys try and steal the couches when we were still on them. Terribly fun. One day I will never forget is March 4th 2010. As you hopefully know, the state keeps cutting the funding they'd normal contribute to State Colleges. This cuts our classes and raised tuition. March 4th was the day the entire k-12, community colleges, state colleges, universities, faculty and staff marched from their schools to Civic center downtown. We spray painted banners and made t-shirts. My banner said "Bail out Schools, NOT Banks" and my T-shirt said "What would Jesus do? He's fight for education!". I still have both items hanging in my bedroom. We marched around campus dancing and chanting "No cuts, No fees, Education should be free!" and "You say Furlough, we say Hell no!" There were about 15 days throughout my freshmen year that were declared Furlough days where the school made ends meet by canceling classes. So we had less time to complete the same amount of work and the teachers didn't get compensated for these days. It was a mess, so we marched downtown holding our signs and letting our voices be heard. The student organizations passed out free bus tickets and we gathered at civic center with 20,000 people affected by the state's inability to fund our basic right to education. It was powerful, there were speeches, art, musical performers, spoken word, news cameras, and such a heavy presence of young children marching. The unity I felt that day, all of us joining together in support of one cause was astonishing.