Hassina+Begum+2


Pakistani Student Association //– a place where you can be yourself//

College is nothing like high school when it comes to meeting people. With college being so gigantic, you can’t make friends easily. For this reason student clubs and associations are a helpful start. The Pakistani Student Association (PSA) is a great way to meet other Pakistani people. The objective of the club isn’t to keep you within your own culture group, but to start off with people you can connect with in order to be comfortable enough to branch out. It’s also a place where you can go to in order to gain help, whether that is with school work or questions you might have about the new environment. PSA is located in the Campus Center, third floor where all the other cultural club spaces are. The club space isn’t very big; we have about one long wooden table for the club along with a few plastic, hard, gray chairs. Though the tables around the Pakistani club space don’t belong to us, we still use them considering the other cultural clubs haven’t showed up yet. The floor is green carpeted, so it’s comfortable to sit on when we play games (deck of cards, Taboo, or Charades.) There is a big Pakistani flag over the table to mark our club space. The Pakistani flag is one quarter white on the left side the remaining three quarters is a green background with a white crescent moon and a white star in that crescent moon. We don’t have as many students as we would like in the club. Overall, we have about twenty people that come there often and even though there are more Pakistani/Indian students in the school, they never bother to stop by. You’ll see a lot of backpacks lying around or notebooks/textbooks because nobody would steal it. We have our very own printer we can use, and the students usually bring their own laptops. Many of them prefer to do their school work and study during their free time before or after classes. Instead of isolating themselves in the library, they rather study with friends. We have a couple of drawers that have snacks (Lays chips, Cheese dip, crackers, candy), books (Statistics, psychology, and nursing textbooks), and other supplies stored in. In the mornings, it’s usually very quiet. Majority of the students that go to PSA have classes later in the afternoon. All you can hear some door far in the distant that keeps closing and opening. You can hear the distant voices from downstairs and the offices right across. The sound of keys jingling and papers turning is one you won’t miss. All I can smell during the morning is my own perfume, and the coffee I always get. We don’t have enough money for our own coffee machine yet, so we do have to buy our coffee in the cafeteria. Pakistani’s usually drink tea, but because the majority of us grew up here in America, we are use to drinking coffee. During the afternoon and evening is when the PSA crowed gets together. Everybody is off from their classes so the deck of cards and board games come out. People start jamming the music on their laptops so about three different songs are playing. These songs include the latest American ones (Lady Gaga, Jay Sean, Brittany Spears), along with Bollywood (Hollywood to India) music (Popular Indian artists include Sunidhi Chauhan and Sonu Nigam.) Kids begin to tell jokes or funny stories while others listen and laugh. They mostly use English to communicate but sometimes they will use Urdu, which is spoken in both Pakistan and India. You can tell they are either from India or Pakistan by their skin tone. Pakistani’s are more of a Tan color while Indians are slightly darker than that. Food is brought from downstairs, and those who don’t have it steal some fries or beg for a bite. Half of the kids are always chewing gum, usually the minty kind. We usually search the drawers for some candy, when cravings kick in. The thing about the PSA is not everyone there is Pakistani but you meet people of similar culture. They are people from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Palestine as well. This, along with the other cultural groups shows how diverse University of Massachusetts Boston is. It’s a mystery when and by whom PSA was founded (even the president of the club doesn’t know), so it has been around for a while. It used to be located on the second floor of the campus center next to the Muslim Student Association. It had to be moved to the third floor because all the cultural clubs had to be kept together. Though we’ll never know the founder, he has done many of us students a big favor. The people at the PSA are very welcoming and always will make you feel like a part of the club. Nothing is ever awkward, they are very open minded, social people, and it’ll make you feel like you’ve known them for years.