All white platform shoes
Black and White Checkered Vans
Unique Nike “Air” High-tops
Mismatching Navy and Yellow Crocs
To Natalie and I, diversity means understanding people’s uniqueness and bringing them together to make an environment of difference, variety, and inclusion.
Over the weekend, my friend Natalie and I decided to embark on a trip around campus with one goal in mind: capturing diversity. How we were going to go about this was a mystery. We decided we would start taking pictures of things and come up with a theme as we went–our original idea was backpacks, but we found it rather difficult to find anyone with a backpack on a Saturday.
We tried everything from hairstyles to shirts, but we ended up settling on shoes. Shoes are an excellent way in which someone goes about expressing themselves. A pair of shoes tells a lot about a person. For example, if someone is wearing sandals, you can assume that they will be having a more relaxed day, and not going to the gym or for a hike, because people wear different shoes for different events.
The first pair of shoes are an all-white platform style laced shoe. When we approached these ladies as we were walking by the creamery, they were more than happy to participate in our project. They expressed how overjoyed that they were to hear about Penn State Students wanting to capture the diversity around our wonderful campus. The all-white style of shoes is a very minimalistic style that works with anything, no matter how painful they are to clean. You can wear them to go out with friends, go to a party, or just as a final piece to put together the perfect outfit. I also noted that as I looked around, I think these were also the only platform shoes that we came across.
Our second pair of shoes are the classic black and white checkered vans. I believe that most own or have seen these wonderful shoes, but everyone also knows the struggle it is to keep these clean like white shoes. This pair here looked fresh out of the box, although I’m not exactly sure if they are. I personally own a pair of these shoes, and mine are dirtied and torn, so the respect I have for this student to have a nice clean pair is high. He also gets bonus points for noting that he was working on a project that was similar to ours!
At the beginning of our shoot, we decided that we would start at the Findlay Commons, for it was close to the halls and it was the middle of the day. We came across a student wearing shoes that I do not think Natalie or I have ever seen before. This student was wearing black and white Nike Air high-tops with the word “Air” printed real large on the heel. They also had holes in the bottom by design, which I thought was really intriguing. He was more than happy to pose for our shots, and then we shook hands, thanked him, and carried on with the shoot.
Right after we left the commons, we saw a young man about to walk into Brumbaugh Hall, but we couldn’t help but look at this guy’s outlandish shoe choice. He wore a mismatched navy and yellow Crocs. We thought that they were cool for a couple of different reasons. Both Natalie and I grew up wearing Crocs, so it sparked a feeling of nostalgia for the both of us. We also thought “who would dare wear mismatched shoes,” but clearly this student dared, and he rocked it. As Natalie snapped the pictures, he questioned whether this was for a project or not, trying to be funny, so we all shared a laugh and assured him that this is in fact for a project.
The variety of shoes that we saw on this day were a clear indicator for our campus’s diversity. Each pair represented a story and a purpose for being worn, reminding us all that we are surrounded by diversity, which is truly a wonderful thing to have. Without diversity, we would all be the same, wearing the same boring clothes, saying the same boring things, with the same boring lives. Diversity brings our entire campus together as one, and we all contribute to it by bringing our own stories to share.