Cultural Differences Surrounding Religious Beliefs And...

Cultural differences can dramatically hinder the dynamic, communicative practices of collegiate students living in a dormitory. Specifically, the cultural differences surrounding religious beliefs and video game habits can create barriers to everyday communication that is necessary between roommates. Choosing the correct dorm to live in can be a very stressful decision for many high school seniors and lead to many unintended consequences by being assigned a roommate that is culturally different. During the summer of 2014, my roommates and I connected through Facebook and began to learn about each other’s lives. Being assigned a triple room, we began to find many similarities between us, such as snowboarding, longboarding, and music†¦show more content†¦These small differences did not bring me to believe we were culturally different, but that we majored in different subjects, which led to our differences in hobbies and lifestyles. When arriving in Boulder, I was faced with more intercultural communicative interactions than at any other time throughout my life in Michigan. While both my roommates were from California, they had shared meanings of certain phrases that I was unfamiliar with before socializing with my roommates. In the greater context, the majority of the intercultural communication that I had practiced back in Michigan were inapplicable while dealing with these new cultures that I was unfamiliar with; however, due to the large amount of immigration to the United States, I was able to adapt to and understand most people I communicated with because of my wide variety of past experiences. Spencer (2002) suggests in one publication that multicultural communication is â€Å"virtually unavoidable† within the United States ( p. 610). Although I agree with Spencer, I would take it a step further to argue that students at the University of Colorado Boulder in particular have the one of the highest r ates of intercultural communication interactions based on the wide variety of locations students originate from, the many different belief systems, and the natural open-mindedness of the Boulder citizens harnesses the myriad of subcultures that strive in such an accepting