Place lumps of avocado, thinly sliced raw fish, strips of crab and chopped cucumber atop a bed of steamed rice. Then roll everything up in a sheet of crisp, dried seaweed, slice, dip in a mixture of soy sauce and wasabi. Eat, eat, eat. Chase everything with pink pickled ginger and warm sake.

Everyone who came to my apartment for sushi night on Saturday learned this method of making and eating futomaki. In attendance was a diverse crowd of people from different ethnicities, socio-economic backgrounds and physical locales.

I’ve never really thought much about diversity. It always seemed like an abstract American belief along the lines of liberty, justice and equality. The cynic in me even took it as a politically correct “code word” for affirmative action; yet, through simple events like sushi night, I’ve come to see diversity as an integral part of the college experience.

We all come to this university to get educations and broaden our perspectives of the world. The classroom provides an intellectual environment in which ideas can be considered, debated and refined. Outside the classroom, however, we’re given a (relatively) safe physical environment to put these ideas into practice.

We see diversity working at our university because we’re all crammed together and given the opportunity to learn about other cultures by meeting people from them. I have some “enlightened friends” who actively seek out culturally enriching experiences.

I am more simple-minded: I like good food and good fun. Some of the best experiences I’ve had at this university have been while exploring other cultures.

Can you see yourself in a dense swath of people dancing and singing around the Torah scrolls in Hillel? The welcoming and tradition-rich Jewish community (of which I am often mistaken as being a member, maybe in large part because of my large nose) on the campus hosts a number of annual festivities that are a blast. Each year during Simchat Torah, which celebrates the commencement of a new cycle of Torah reading, the scrolls are brought out in a series of circuits, where everyone enthusiastically (for lack of a stronger word) dances around them in celebration late into the night.

Imagine being packed in a crowd weaving your way between street vendors selling exotic foods such as bubble tea, lo mein and green bean soup while wushu sword masters elegantly slice through the air with steel blades. All of this against the musical backdrop of a Chinese violin, known as an erhu, with its amazing voice-like sound quality. This market isn’t in the streets of Taipei, it’s in the Stamp Student Union Grand Ballroom at the Taiwanese Night Market put on by the Taiwanese-American Student Association.

Or picture a hot day on McKeldin Mall spent eating great Indian food and listening to bhangra with 100 of your friends. Then give everyone packets of brightly colored dye that cover everything in amazing shades of blue, purple, red, green, yellow and orange when mixed with water. Then add water balloons. That’s exactly what happens at Holi Mela, which celebrates the coming of spring, put on annually by the Hindu Students Council.

Sharing your culture can be frightening because it can hurt to see your friends dislike something that is of deep personal importance to you. Some of the people at sushi night couldn’t handle eating seaweed, a lot of them didn’t like koto music, and absolutely no one liked eating natto (a delicacy consisting of fermented soybeans with a very sharp and very distinctive flavor), but it was still gratifying to show others a part of me.

Because of our school’s emphasis on diversity, I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing so many cultures without ever leaving the campus. Learning about the world is easy when we bring the world to the campus.

Benjamin Johnson is a senior physics major. He can be reached at katsuo@umd.edu.