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Mandy Lacombe won a diversity award without intending to be diverse."I didn't set out to do something in particular," she said. "I didn't make a formal presentation and force (people) to be diverse."
Lacombe, a sophomore general studies major, said she has been a quadriplegic since breaking her neck in a car accident when she was in her mid-20s.
"I just became involved in activities I was interested in, and nobody else paralyzed was involved with them," she said. "So people were exposed to paralysis, and they had never been exposed to that before."
Lacombe received one of 18 Keeping the Dream Alive Diversity Awards April 5 at the Memorial Student Center.
Lacombe came to Texas A&M in fall 2002, and said she is considering applying to the Lowry Mays Business School.
Lacombe said she has been a counselor for Howdy Camp and T-Camp and served on the Student Government Association Development Team.
This year, she is going to be a Muster host and serves on two rodeo committees for the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.
Lacombe said diverse groups are not just groups of people who are of a different race or religion or have a disability.
"For some reason, people just tend to focus on smaller groups as being diverse," she said. "Diversity is so much broader than people think."
Lacombe said every person is diverse because every person is different in his own way.
"We're all diverse in our personality, likes and dislikes, and the way we look or the height we are," she said. "But, people focus on the people that may be their perception of being diverse."
The Keeping the Dream Alive Diversity Awards have been held since 1991 to acknowledge and honor the efforts of members of the A&M community who strive during the year to promote understanding and appreciation of diversity at A&M.
Lacombe received the Gary Gray Memorial Student Recognition Award, which was named after a student who was quadriplegic and died while attending A&M.
"I was astounded and astonished and shocked, but very, very honored and humbled by it," Lacombe said. "Gary sounded like a really great person too, so it was really an honor."
Among other awards given out, John Scroggs, a graduate student in science and technology journalism from Corpus Christi, received the ALLIES Rainbow Award for his work in the gay and lesbian community.
"Diversity is all about accepting, advocating for and learning from the plurality of voices that exist," Scroggs said.
Scroggs is 33 years old and a full-time communication specialist for the A&M Institute for Scientific Computation.
Scroggs is president of the Rainbow Graduate Student Association and a member of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered Aggies Professional Network.
Scroggs said he is also on the Graduate Student Council and the College of Liberal Arts Graduate Student Council.
The Residence Hall Association won a group award for diversity, called the Champion of Diversity award Lauren Chrismer, RHA vice president of operations and a senior geology major, said the group promoted diversity this semester through the Diversi-tee Project, where it made and distributed T-shirts.
"(The shirt) said 'It doesn't matter' on the front, and then on the back, it said 'We're all Aggies,' and it had many different descriptive words about diversity on the back, like, male, female, black, white, homosexual, heterosexual," Chrismer said. "All different sorts of diversity words that have either caused controversy or those some people might have a problem with at A&M."
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