"With other Koreans, we had so many similarities that I really wasn't as different anymore," Park says. "I was one person in a group."

The positive side to his decision, Park says, is an abundance of acquaintances from different racial and ethnic backgrounds--acquaintances he would never have made had he surrounded himself solely with Koreans.

But Park says his decision also left him without a clearly-defined circle of friends. Because of the loneliness he feels, Park is now pledging a fraternity, hoping to create a tight group that he feels he lacks.

"Because I choose not to hang out with other Koreans, and because so many of my friends are different from me and have different activities and stuff, I realize that I feel this sense of alienation," Park says. "This is an unfortunate side-effect of diversity, that many people feel this way, too."

Park faced a tough balancing act--risking loneliness and alienation, or shielding himself within a group that, in his opinion, did not interact enough with others on campus.

Some students, like Park, consider campus ethnic groups unnecessarily isolated from the rest of the community. In dining halls and rooming groups, students often separate themselves along racial lines that are easily identifiable.

And regardless of who chooses to sit with whom--and who chooses not to sit with whom--that separation can be highly visible. The tension it creates is often palpable.

Many students agree that a diverse community is an asset, rather than a liability. But diversity alone, they say, is incomplete.

"I don't think diversity itself is the goal," says Nicholas C. Weinstock '91-'92, co-chair of Actively Working Against Racism and Ethnocentrism (AWARE). "Diversity isn't so much an issue as what's done with diversity--how the diverse groups act with each other."

Although the campus has a number of ethnically oriented clubs, the amount of communication between them is surprisingly limited. Even when ethnic groups join together for a common purpose, the collaboration sometimes goes awry.

For instance, when members of several minority groups planned a protest of European oppression on Columbus Day this year, Native Americans at Harvard Co-President Joseph W. Secondine '92 didn't learn about it until he walked past demonstrators at the John Harvard statue.

"It was kind of weird, because I hadn't heard about it before," Secondine says.

Minority groups on campus may appear at odds, some students say, because often they are at odds.

"Minority organizations are in a sense competing for the attention of the average white Harvard student," Weinstock said at an October meeting of the Minority Students Alliance (MSA). He said there is "so much energy that's wasted by sort of elbowing each other out."

But many minority students say that a series of events last spring proved that different ethnic groups could work well together.