With very little prompting, she gave me eloquent and insightful I Am Notre Dame gold. I was so impressed that I couldn't cut either topic...!

                  On the negative perception of athletes...

“I’m on the track team. I do shotput, hammer, weight, and discus. I came from a small high school, where there wasn’t a negative perception of athletes. Then at Notre Dame, people would say, 'Athletes are stupid people. Athletes can’t do anything. They have everything handed to them.' That’s not true! People on the track team are some of the smartest people I know in the entire university. And that’s so cool that they’re so multifaceted: they’re a D1 athlete and extremely intelligent. The negative image put me a little down in the dumps freshman year. I was like, wow, people think I’m just like this without even meeting me. You know, ‘Oh, you’re an athlete,’ with that sarcastic undertone. Assumptions shouldn’t be made about people. You should wait to learn something about someone before you jump to the conclusion that they are something they are not. Everybody here has something to offer."

                    As for diversity?

"It’s true that diversity isn’t huge here, but I learned that there are so many different factors that come into diversity: socioeconomic backgrounds, race, gender, culture. So when you hear people say, ‘I don’t care about diversity,’ and I’ve heard that before, it bothers me. Diversity is new perspective. If everyone has come from the same place, everyone will have the same ideas and the same mindsets. Diversity is where social change develops. Notre Dame has made great strides in coeducation. It’s not even that long. That shows that a University can change, which gives me hope that the world as a whole can change. I like that Notre Dame is striving for diversity now, especially with an atmosphere of inclusion. And diversity is a buzzword right now. I’m excited to see where the University is moving with it.”