On Thursday afternoon, January 9, Dr. David Shim, senior lecturer in Psychology at Boston University, addressed students and faculty on the subject of “diversity”. His appearance was sponsored by the St. Mark’s Community and Equity Committee.
A licensed clinical psychologist who also teaches at Emerson College and the University of Massachusetts, Dr. Shim kept his audience laughing, engaged, and most importantly, reflective, throughout the duration of his talk. In his address, Dr. Shim focused on the subject of challenging one’s internalized culture whilst being open to those less familiar or simply different. He argued that through the ability to do those two things, an individual or a community would be better able to understand, appreciate, and potentially add pieces of these new cultures to one’s own personal picture, thus becoming more knowledgeable and more global.
Dr. Shim was born in South Korea.. He explained this topic and his beliefs through a series of humorous personal anecdotes and insightful lessons learned during his transition from life in South Korea to life in Hoboken, NJ, when his family immigrated to the U.S in the late 60s. He shared with the audience his phobia of bologna, his infatuation with refrigerators, and his fear of having his daily ‘hot dog and egg sandwich’ ridiculed during lunchtime at his elementary school. Making connections between these different accounts from his life, Dr. Shim developed a comprehensive message for his audience: that even the smallest aspects of culture and society, things that we take for granted because we live in them, are things that might be “exotic” to members of other cultures, At the end of his presentation, the audience was left in a reflective zone in which everyone had established a personal goal to remain open-minded to other cultures and eager to explore them.
Dr. Shim is not unknown to the St. Mark’s community. He spent time with students last spring at a Pathways Pizza dinner, and more recently, this past December, he presented at a house heads meeting. His clinical interests focus on trauma, gender differences in mental health, and the impact of family and culture on human development. Interestingly, Dr. Shim has black belts in both karate and Jiu Jitsu, both relevant to his doctoral dissertation which examined how learning self-defense, especially for women who have been sexually assaulted, appears to provide significant psychological benefits.