Georgia Southern University's Multicultural Student Center held its first Diversity, Inclusion & Fairness (D.I.F.) Conference with the goal of openly talking, listening, and learning about diversity, inclusion, and fairness on Saturday in the Russell Union.

Walking into the conference at 8 am, there were a handful of people there already eating breakfast, and by 8:30 am, there were close to a couple hundred people in the ballroom.

With three break out sessions each housing four or more presentations, the D.I.F. conference covered ample topics with room for everyone to find something they were interested in.

Attendees ranged from Georgia Southern students to high school students to graduate students of all ages, and I wish I had known more information before hand to encourage more people to go.

The opening speaker, Justin Jones-Fosu, was lively and entertaining. As he spoke, the audience seemed to wake up (but that also could have been because of the free coffee) and become engaged in his topic of redefining diversity.

It was half way through this opening speech that I decided the D.I.F. conference deserved a series of articles. If all of the sessions were going to be as good as this one, then they all deserved to be talked about.

Justin, as he encouraged us to call him, began his speech with a game called "Do you like me?" In this game, he displayed pictures of media icons, such as Ellen Degeneres, Kim Kardashian, and Baraka Obama, on the board and asked the audience to clap if they liked the person of boo if they didn't.

The audience was hesitant at first, but everyone woke up and shouted "boo" as loudly as they could upon seeing a photo of Donald Trump on the screen. The final photo was a photo of a man no one knew (Justin's father), which was greeted by hesitation and a few solitary claps. Justin played this game to display the feelings we have on media icons and how they differ from feeling of other strangers despite the fact that we don't know these icons on a personal level either.

He went on to talk about personality test, such as the Meyerseniors Briggs test and the "true colors" test, and how they may be accurate but often provide no sense of how each personality type will work with another.

Justin proposed four personality types, or "social styles" and explained how they work (or don't work) with one another. These socials styles were vastly different from one another, but the point was that each one is needed for any job to get done; each social style is a necessity to have a diverse and functional team of people.

I want to write more about this, but I know that it deserves it's own article later down the road. This is just a taste of what the D.I.F. conference had to offer.

Some other noteworthy sessions were on the topics of self-care and self-love and on the basics of privilege. The Courageous Conversations lunch, where people from many different walks of life sat and discussed some controversial topics, was another note able experience. And I plan to cover each of these in my articles to come.