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Some college students choose a school where they don't fit, on purpose
Last fall, when John DiGravio arrived as a freshman at Williams College — a private, liberal arts institution in the Berkshires — the conservative from Central Texas expected to be in the political minority.
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Some posters booed the group. One called it “embarrassing.” Another suggested the students should “start a better club.”
At first DiGravio was taken aback. Then he took his outsider status as a calling. A few months earlier he had started a small, conservative club. He decided to make it bigger. He invited a speaker to give an evening talk on “What It Means to Be a Conservative.” Dozens of students showed up.
“I think I really hit a chord,” he said.
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These days, elite students like DiGravio, who can financially and/or academically choose from an array of colleges, are often obsessed with “finding the right fit.” Surveys like ones conducted by EAB, an education consulting firm in Washington, routinely indicate that for this group, “fitting in” is one of the top factors when deciding where to go to school.
But some students, like DiGravio, 19, are discovering the pros and cons of being an outsider.
Today, top public universities are accepting out-of-state students in record numbers. Lesser-known schools sometimes referred to as “hidden gems” have made big efforts to lure high-performing students from far away. Some college counselors say they are encouraging students to explore universities in Canada, England and even Abu Dhabi.
But many say they don’t recommend that for every high school senior.
Nikki Bruno, a New Jersey-based admissions coach, says students have to have an “adventurous spirit,” and seem particularly confident before she suggests a college environment that may feel a bit out of their comfort zone.
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Yodit Gebretsadik, 20, is that kind of student. At first, being at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, which has one of the most moneyed student bodies in the country, was isolating for Gebretsadik, a mechanical engineering major from Jacksonville, Florida, who got there by way of a competitive scholarship program.
Gebretsadik, whose father manages a convenience store, said many students arrived with coveted internships their parents had helped them get and had high school engineering experiences inside and out of the classroom that she didn’t know existed.
She was cloaked in doubt during her first semester. But she said an active campus program designed to support first-generation college students helped her connect with professors and other students like her.
Soon she began to excel in her science and math classes, in many cases outperforming the peers who had arrived with more initial exposure. “It was a huge confidence booster,” she said.
Sociologists who study outsiders say it’s no surprise. They say people who can find even a small support group can become more fully engaged with who they are, and what their core values are, by being in a place that feels foreign.
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Pietro Geraci, 22, a libertarian who graduated in May from Vassar College, a small liberals arts school in Poughkeepsie, New York, with a degree in astronomy, says being a political outsider requires some courage.
During Geraci’s freshman year, he joined a small campus chapter of the Young Americans for Liberty, a Washington-based libertarian youth group, and reconnected it with the national headquarters.
Making friends became challenging. “People here don’t like it when you go around saying taxation is theft,” he said. Most of his friends are liberal, he said, and some came to the group’s meetings and were eager to engage in “fruitful conversation.” And Geraci, who speaks with gusto about his ideology, did not let the political tension deter him from touring Cuba with the school’s choir and spending time in the school’s observatory.
Tiago Rachelson, 19, is white, and he attends Morehouse College, a historically black school in Atlanta. Rachelson, a sociology major, said he enrolled because the mission of the school “called to him.” His decision, though, caused waves among some students who were interviewed for a documentary released this summer by VICE.
One young man, commenting in the documentary about the central role historically black colleges and universities have played for black Americans, said the idea that a lot of white students would inundate his school made him feel disrespected.
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Rachelson acknowledged those feelings, but he said that navigating the experience had been “transformational.”
And he is not alone in feeling that the outsider role can have a profound impact on one’s sense of self.
Amir Goldberg, an associate professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University Graduate School of Business, who studies outsiders inside the workplace, says being an outsider can cause culture shock. But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
“If you have support, that shock can be translated into an advantage,” he said.
That was the case for Jonah Shainberg, a fencer from Rye, New York, who is Jewish. When he was accepted to Notre Dame, a football-heavy Catholic university in Indiana, his mother balked at the idea.
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“I’m not sending my Jewish son to Notre Dame,” Shainberg recalled her saying. He was also skeptical.
But once he was there, Shainberg, who graduated this year with a bachelor’s degree in business administration, discovered something about himself he had not totally understood before: His faith was central to his identity.
“I think Notre Dame made me more Jewish,” he said.
For Elyse Hutcheson, 21, the opposite was true. Her time at Hillsdale College, a Christian college in Hillsdale, Michigan, helped her get in touch with her views on reproductive rights, immigration and social welfare programs.
When she arrived, she said, “I knew I wasn’t a conservative, but I didn’t know I was a liberal.” By her junior year, she had re-energized a defunct club for campus Democrats and realized she was agnostic.
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She graduated this year with a degree in psychology and art and took a job as a research assistant at Brown University, a liberal-leaning college in Providence, Rhode Island.
While Hutcheson admits it’s a relief to now be around like-minded thinkers, she says fitting in comes with its own pitfalls.
“I don’t want to become complacent because the ideas I have aren’t being questioned anymore,” she said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Kyle Spencer © 2018 The New York Times
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