As college applications trickled in this past winter vacation, ambitious, idealistic students probably submitted essays about their resolve to solve the Middle East conflicts or the impending doom that gentrification will inflict on lower-class youths. When I applied to colleges, I avoided the “why diversity is important to me” school of questions. I had nothing soulful or profound to say about that. I’m sure we were expected to talk about how friendship with someone outside our race had changed our life. We were probably supposed to write something warm and fuzzy so that college admissions officers could pat themselves on the back about the rewards of affirmative action. Personally, a lot of my friends from an early age have been outside my race. I’ve never felt that interracial friendship was anything novel or odd, much less something to pat myself on the back about.

To me, diversity is so much more about the little ways in which we differ. You might not personally find the diversity of musical tastes, shoe sizes, or clothing choices deep, meaningful, or worthy of much serious discussion, especially when I’m sure others my age are more focused on their future careers as brain surgeons, or on the proactive little steps they have already begun to take to improve interfaith relations and promote interfaith unity. Not to challenge or disrespect the well-deserved attention towards those serious matters, but I’m more preoccupied by the trivial little things that enlighten someone’s world and self-perception.

A friend of mine did choose to address the diversity question in her Common App. She wrote about how, in elementary school, her feet felt clumsily oversized because she was surrounded by dainty-footed, porcelain-doll-like little girls. Entering a more diverse student body in high school, however, she was delighted by a discovery she made on a bowling excursion with her volleyball team: they, too, shared her shoe size, and some, in fact, had even bigger feet. Her essay was partly inspired by a Grinnell sample. In it, a girl celebrated the contribution of her exceptionally small wrist to the diversity of any community.

Although I don’t recommend being proud of especially tiny wrists, there are healthier alternatives to diversify a community. My younger sister has noted, too, that there seems to be a greater variety of students in her high school than in our elementary school. “People here actually have interests,” she exclaims. “There are people who like musical theatre, and writing. And they write poems!” By contrast, the interests of all her grade school classmates fell under two categories: Jesus and volleyball.

As indifferent as I myself would be to a proliferation of poetry-writing peers (verse has never been my cup of tea), I can sympathize to some extent with her experiences in moving up from one level of schooling to the next. When I was part of an after-school day care, I became nervous every Lenten season. In a largely Catholic program, I felt like the only kid without ashes on my forehead on Ash Wednesday, and shifted uncomfortably as everyone else asked me what I had given up. I felt singled out as I was served meat during snack time while everyone else abstained. It confusingly made me feel less American, but my later experiences confirmed that the feeling was unjustified. You see, in high school, there were Jewish people in addition to Catholics. Observing the full process of Lent no longer felt like a requisite for being a true American.   

The smaller and thus more insular a student body population you find yourself in, the less likely you are to find people who share the same interests as you or enjoy doing the same things that you do, especially if your tastes like a little off-kilter. You just end up spending much more time playing volleyball than you would like because that’s the only thing anyone else is willing to do together.

At least with a greater variety of personalities, we can furthermore take comfort in the discovery that—yes—there are always freakier people out there than ourselves. When I first entered high school, I thought the people there were a lot more individualistic than the ones I had been exposed to in elementary school. Everyone in elementary school had been so… mainstream. But in high school people listened to all this alternative, indie, and underground music I had never heard of, and I felt as if everyone else was clad in unconventional attire except for me. Fearing that I had suddenly become bland amongst a bunch of weirdoes, I decided to play up any quirks in my personality (though of course, ever remaining “true to myself”). Suddenly being “messed up” had become fashionable (I blame the emo trend). As much as this further plagued my insecurities, the important thing was the confirmation that there were… alternatives. That people did not fall under two categories: those who wore Abercrombie and Fitch, and those who did not.

But as idiosyncratic as everyone appeared when they first started high school, with their dramatic hair color changes and personally redefined sense of social boundaries, they all seemed to converge into the same indistinguishable identity by the time we graduated. It seemed that they had only felt compelled to assert some kind of novel persona as a cry for attention freshman year. Was it all a facade? As they all became more alike, I felt that anything that I had originally perceived to be surprising or unusual about them was just surface-level. Underneath it all, they were just… normal. And the options again became narrower. When you’ve been with the same limited set of people for so long, it can feel as if those were the only types of people out there, as if no one else had a different political leaning, set of hobbies, or attitude towards academics. Plagued by youthful insecurity, everyone else eventually adopted whatever viewpoint was fashionable.

Fortunately, your definition of “everyone” shifts as you move from one set of people to a larger one. In college, there are some people whose attitudes and outlooks don’t correspond with the ones I had previously encountered. I know I shouldn’t need external validation when my opinions fundamentally differ from others’, but it’s nice not to feel like a freak once in a while. In high school, people always told me that I talked about random, weird things—why others deemed to be my usual “philosophic” ruminations (not a designation that I found particularly flattering). I’ve heard those comments less frequently so far in college. I don’t know if the four years of high school effectively wore out my eccentricities, or if, since we’re not stuck with the same people all day long anymore, I’m just not saying the same random, weird, things to the same weird, random people anymore.

At any rate, in college I’ve met a few people who ask even weirder, more random, and more uncomfortable questions than I—and with greater persistence. Somehow all of my eccentricities suddenly pale in comparison. Maybe diversity is just a conspiracy to make freaks feel normal, without forcing them to compromise their original personality. Who knows? Maybe I just haven’t gotten to know the people here well enough. Perhaps I’m yet to discover that their behaviors, too, spring from the same insecurity, self-consciousness, and anxiety about fitting dictated the leanings of my high school peers, but at least, for now, any such tendencies are manifesting in different, if not, refreshing ways.