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Estera Bors
Professor Kramer
UNST 126A
April 26th, 2016
Diversity of Human Experience
As an immigrant, I feel like I have a lot to say about this topic. In my
essay about work, I talked about how much my parents influenced me
through their personal experiences. When we first came to America, my
parents didnt have many options in terms of jobs. My dad worked for a
manufacturing company where he would physically mold different objects
before they were welded and completed. He came from Moldova with a
medical degree, but was only able to do physically demanding work. I can
only imagine how frustrating it must have been for him knowing that this
was all he was qualified to do in the United States. Through his hard work,
my family was able to survive. When the economy crashed in 2008, it was
really difficult for us because my parents just bought a house a year and a
half prior.
Although life wasnt really easy for us, my family stayed together and
depended on each other for support, which really helped us to move forward.
My family has lived in America for nearly 13 years now and we are all
citizens, but a lot of times, we are still treated like immigrants. My mom went

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to college in order to learn English and is very fluent in the language, but
when she got her first job preparing taxes, it was difficult for her to speak
without an accent. I remember when she was telling us about her first day at
work. She had picked up the phone and was speaking to a client when that
client rudely demanded to speak to someone who actually speaks English.
What that client did not know was the fact that my mom spoke three
languages, specifically Russian, Romanian, and English. She was really
offended by that client and had a very hard time talking to clients after that.
Through that experience, I realized just how poorly immigrants are treated.
Not all of it was bad though. When my mom took the tax course, she
took it because it was free and it gave her something to do. After completing
the tax course, she stumbled upon a job offer for someone who speaking
Romanian/Russian and has completed the tax course she had just
completed. Maybe it was a coincidence, but because of her diversity, she
was able to get a job that not very many people would be qualified for. I
think that its very important to have a lot of diversity, and not just through
race. People are raised in different ways and in different circumstances, but
that makes each person unique and allows them to think a certain way and
act a certain way. If everyone was the same, I doubt we would have
advanced as much as we have. If we were all the same, there would be no
Rosa Parks, or Martin Luther King Jr, or Nelson Mandela, and so on.
Sometimes, diversity can be a struggle for people because they feel

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alienated, but other times, it can really bring people together, like it did with
my family.