Author: emma tkach

The analysis of the UBC website in regards to the Jump Start Orientation Leader application page revealed many more aspects to the question of equal opportunity than I had originally assessed.  We were analyzing this question from the perspective of Aboriginal students.  However, while working through this assignment I realized the complexity of inequality when it comes to social minorities.  I also found that our analysis could only be as accurate as the information that we researched and observed, as none of our group members had any Aboriginal ancestry, so we could not speak to a true experience and opinion on the subject.  I felt that his was definitely our biggest limitation when judging the website through the lens of an Aboriginal student, as the majority of our proposed challenges for Aboriginal students were based on stereotypes or generalizations which are likely not accurate for many of the students at UBC, or Aboriginal people in general.

The operational definition used to identify Aboriginal students was anyone registered under the Indian Act, or anyone who has Metis or Inuit ancestry.  As well, they must be a current UBC student in second year or greater.  This definition fulfilled the most general age and eligibility requirements for the position of a Jump Start Orientation Leader, therefore providing a common base level to compare the experiences of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students.

Jump Start Orientation Leaders are UBC students who work in a program designed for incoming first year international students.  The program runs during the last two weeks of the summer and the leaders are required to live on campus for those two weeks, as well as attend training days at the end of the second term, before summer.  This specific role of an orientation leader is more intensive than other leadership roles available through UBC.  We saw this higher time commitment and increased training as possible inhibiting factors for Aboriginal students.  For example, Aboriginal students may be more likely than non-Aboriginal students to be working part-time during the school year to help fund their studies, and therefore would not be able to devote the time required to the training/job.

When considering the website itself, we found no obtrusive problems or general inaccessibility’s.  It had a readability score of 11.2 which should be easily understood by any UBC student applying for this position.  Additionally, the layout of the application page was very linear and well-organized, and it clearly outlined all responsibilities, expectations and eligibilities of the job.  In no way did it discriminate against any minority group.  In fact, the website even mentioned that knowledge of Aboriginal history is a desirable trait.  Conclusively, the website was well structured for providing equal opportunities to UBC students applying for this position.

While the website’s overall layout and universal design was very accessible to any student attending UBC, the idea of equally accessible opportunities is still more complicated than simply the design of a webpage or readability of an article. The determining factors of inequality most likely begin before Aboriginal students have entered UBC.  Because once attending a progressive, top university it is much more common to be treated equally with the rest of the community; it’s getting to this point which is the challenge.  The statistics also support this claim, as only 1% of all UBC students are Aboriginal students.  Clearly the inequity begins before UBC. Aboriginal youth may have been disadvantaged throughout their lives, possibly making them less confident in their abilities or maybe less willing to work for a program like Jump Start.  The Jump Start program in particular might be less attractive to Aboriginal students as it is working with international students who may not know about Aboriginal history in Canada, creating the possibility of racial or cultural ignorance or even prejudice.

In conclusion, the question of whether there are equal opportunities to get involved on campus is very dependent on the group of interest and the program of interest.  In this case, I believe the opportunity advertised by UBC promotes equality, but it is social constraints and discrimination outside of the university which makes the chances of minority groups entering certain programs highly unlikely.

I’ve seen a large change in my social interactions and social circles since coming to Vancouver for university.  I grew up in a small town where the people I was closest to were not necessarily people who shared my values and aspirations, nor did I share theirs.  The strongest social force keeping us together was the similarity of general attributes such as age, education and the context in which we knew each other.  Since coming to university, I’ve found that my network expanded to people with who I did share many common goals and beliefs.  While gaining these new connections, I simultaneously lost contact with most people from my hometown, aside from my family and a couple friends.  However, after creating and analyzing my network in this activity, I still found that the underlying social structure keeping me close to the majority of my network is a geographic proximity and a similar education/occupation status.  My data seems to support this, as the majority of my network are people who are also in university, particularly UBC, and have similar educational/occupational standings as myself.  Additionally, the data collected about my means of communication with the people closest to me reveals that we communicate primarily offline rather than online, suggesting that these are not long-distance relationships and instead people that I see quite often.

 

The trends in my data also correlate with my group member’s. We all had high homophily ratings in the gender attribution of our data and comparable numbers in our education and context columns, with most of our data corresponding to fairly high homophily ratings as well.  Our group was all girls, and all within a very similar age range.  Therefore, these similarities in data suggest that maybe the importance of gender, education and context are some of the key attributes when it comes to people of our age, gender and social situation choosing people for their networks, respectively.

 

Besides the similarities between myself and my network, I found the connections between everyone in my network was generally very strong.  All the people in my network had strong ties with at least 4 other people, suggesting they’re all quite connected.  There could be several reasons for this, both personal and sociological.  Personal reasons being that I want to have a tightly linked network and therefore I will familiarize my friends and family with each other.  Sociological reasons being more general, but equally relevant.  For example, the interconnectedness I found within my personal network is also clear on a much larger scale, and is the result of globalization.  It’s difficult to compare the interactions of a small group of people with the interactions of nations, but I can see the uniformity most simply explained by World Society Theory: placing importance of institutions and cultural models on the way nations and individuals are shaped and behave.  This seems to hold true for the connections between my network because cultural norms such as the use of social media essentially keeps everyone in my network connected.  Additionally, it’s the institutions which we have access to that brings and keeps us together.  For example, our universities, jobs and hobbies are all a part of our lives and play an intrinsic role in our connections.  Looking at the people in my life right now, I see that I’m surrounded by people I admire, support, and rely on, making it all the more interesting to see the underlying social forces that keep me close to them, even though it feels like we are solely the ones keeping each other connected.