Many students have heard about the Chinese New Year, but the Vietnamese and other cultures also celebrate the Lunar New Year, which is the beginning of a new year based on the lunar calendar.

On Jan. 29, Mason’s Vietnamese Student Association celebrated the Lunar New Year with cultural food, traditional games and New Year’s crafts.

The Vietnamese New Year, or Tết, is an important cultural holiday to Vietnamese families which typically  involves three days of celebration.

Artist Min Li comes to Mason campus to battle against the "made in China" image of Chinese art.

This month, the Confucius Institute welcomes visitors to its Chinese Paper Cutting Exhibit at Mason. The exhibit is located in the JC 123 Gallery and features both the traditional works of artists from China's Fujian province and the works of modern artist Min Li.

The works have been transported to several universities in the U.S. with the help of Li’s liason to Mason Yunhan Zhang.

Students circle up and get their marching orders. Once they receive their schedule the instruction begins and students are forced to step out of their comfort zone and dance their “buttsy” off.

“You hear about this class before you ever walk in,” said junior Elle Thomas, a current student of Nuamah’s. “The class exceeds [your] expectations.”

I consider Mason’s diversity an asset, and I also believe exposure to culture’s outside one’s own is an integral part of the college experience. Thus, I was shocked to hear about the recent string of hate crimes at Oberlin College in Ohio. In the past month, students’ inboxes have been brimming with emails from administration in response to acts of racism, homophobia and anti-Semitism on the same campus that prides itself on being the first college to regularly admit female and African American students.