By Kenji Booey
Congratulations you are now a Zag. But as Uncle Ben once told Peter Parker, “With great power comes great responsibility.” And as a Zag you now have a lot of people excited to see what you will do with this opportunity and this power.
Gonzaga is an amazing community, which you will soon find out reaches across the globe and back. We are a Global Community, which seeks to explore and better the earth we walk on. The amazing thing about that is that this globe we live in, and that Zags influence many parts of, is more diverse than anyone of us could ever imagine.
Because of this, understanding, love and a thirst for knowledge are all things you need to become a Zag and is what helps to make Gonzaga such a diverse Global Community.
Don’t get caught on that word “diversity”. Diversity in OUR global community means race, ethnicity and gender. However it also means diversity in education, in experiences, in travel, in thought, and it means different in every positive sense of the word.
By now you are probably wondering whom the guy behind this lecture of a blog post is. My name is Kenji Booey I am a rising junior, a member of the Comprehensive Leadership Program, a Club Rugby player, a Spokanite, a traveler and an Act Six Scholar. I come from a racially and culturally diverse family and my greatest passion is learning about, experiencing and sharing cultures.
To be a “Zag” means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. For me to be a Zag means to love. It means you love your professors because they love you, it means you love to learn, you love yourself and your neighbor, and you love all people for who they are. This love is where our Global Community finds its necessity for diversity.
It is no secret that Gonzaga does not have the most racially diverse campus. However, as that percentage improves our Global Community grows more and more diverse. And without that diversity we would not be the school and the community that you worked so hard to be apart of.
You have been given an amazing amount of power. It is your job to act responsibly with that power because Gonzaga students get recognized. You will be recognized in Spokane, back home and on campus. But you will also be recognized in the rest of the nation. You will be recognized on airplanes, in bus stations and on the beach both in this country and others.
Our diverse Global Community gives us as Zags the privilege to be noticed across the world as students and agents of change.
I cannot wait for you to hit campus and blossom, as I, and so many other Zags before you have.
Take your culture and share with new people. As you learn about their culture it will quickly become a small part of yours. Take all of your diverse experiences, experiences which no one else has ever experienced, and share those with the world and have a new experience with a new friend. Take the love that Gonzaga fosters and love every person you meet.
Take this opportunity to live in such a diverse Global Community and find out what it means for you to be #BeAZag.