As part of Oak Park High School’s Awareness Week, AMGEN scientists Mariano Janiszewski and Gustavo Buchele gave a presentation Jan. 18 on their experiences living and working around the world.

The event is new to this year’s Awareness Week. According to senior and Advanced Peer Counselor Camille Polk, who helped to organize the event, the presentation was put together in order to provide an unique perspective on social integration, culture shock and diversity in the workplace. Janiszewski and Buchele discussed the struggles of immigration, particularly highlighting the importance of avoiding stereotypes.

“Forget stereotypes. Every person is a different person, and everybody has his or her good side and his or her problems and we have to learn to live with that,” Janiszewski said.

Janiszewski and Buchele are both native Brazilians. Janiszewski lived in Germany for two years while on a grant to work as a researcher at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University of Frankfurt. He later returned to Brazil before moving to U.S. in 2013.

“Different people have different habits, different values sometimes, which not necessarily you have to agree with, but you are there to understand and have some interaction,” Buchele said.

Buchele took part in a clinical and research fellowship at Erasme Hospital from the Free University of Brussels. He returned to Brazil to work at the global pharmaceutical company Eli Lily. Like Janiszewski, Buchele moved to the U.S. while working at AMGEN.

“Something Gustavo said that really resonated me was that there are many ethnicities, but there is only one race — the human race. People focus so much on differences that they fail to see the similarities that unite us together as a race,” Polk wrote in an email.

The presentation concluded with the speakers sharing their own stories of struggling to integrate into a new country.

“I loved learning about living in other countries. The speakers pointed out some of the little differences between the places they had lived that I would have never thought of,” sophomore attendee Maddie Brown wrote in an email. “Diversity is important in a community because it allows people to naturally learn about other cultures. It gives other cultures and people a human quality that you can’t get in a classroom or an online article.”