Tag: friendship

If you looked at my calendar freshman year, you’d have noticed I spent most of my time running between Indian events, studying sessions with other computer science students (who were overwhelmingly white and Asian), and dinners with my friends (who were always upper-middle-class like me.)

I skipped one of those dinners one evening in April to go to this event at the admissions office. I’d just gotten randomly sorted into one of the upperclassman houses where I’d be living for the next three years, and since it was nearby I decided to go there for dinner. A girl who said she had also been sorted into my house came with me. I learned later I’d met her once before, but I didn’t remember her at all.

We talked for hours over dinner and started spending so much time together that, by the end of the school year (which was only about three weeks later), she’d become one of the best friends I’d met that entire seven-month-long school year. We hung out at our house’s formal dance, ate together while railing about life all the time, and spent hours trying (and failing) to study for finals. I learned everything about her, including that she’s part Native American and a first-generation college student.

We quickly realized that our schedules led us to run into each other at least three times a day. “We’ve probably been seeing each other everywhere this year,” we told each other once. “Why didn’t we meet earlier?”

The next time I opened my calendar app I knew why. The only people I ever met were Indians, computer scientists, or upper-middle-class people. In other words, people exactly like me. The only reason I’d actually gotten to know her was pure dumb luck — that one-in-twelve chance that threw us into the same house.

I was so thankful for that dumb luck, but I started wondering just how many amazing people like her I’d been seeing, but never meeting, all year.

A lot, probably.

Harvard’s admitted students weekend, Visitas, was a pretty intimidating time: you were thrown into a huge, unfamiliar place with thousands of people you might never see again and without any place to start building your network.

I was, understandably, scared out of my mind whenever I went into the cavernous dining hall and stood amidst hundreds of incoming freshmen, none of whom I knew. So that was why I’d make a beeline for a table full of Indian people or, at least, one Indian person who looked friendly and had an open seat next to them. That way you’d be guaranteed to have at least one thing in common and they wouldn’t be surprised when you showed up. That strategy was how I met the guy who ended up becoming my best friend in college.

We went to a reception for all the Mid-Atlantic students and soon headed back to the dining hall with some new faces in tow. As we stood outside the serving line we realized that every one of those faces were brown. “We always end up surrounded by Indians,” my best-friend-to-be and I joked.

That night I went to an event at one of the upperclassman houses. I was walking with this white guy and, as I got close to the house, ran into a vaguely Indian-looking girl who was walking with a cadre of white girls. She and I peeled away and started talking about our shared love for Bollywood movies. That’s how I ran into another of my best friends.

The only other good friend I made at Visitas is Chinese. I met her when we accidentally ran into each other at a science symposium and started talking about our interest in computer science and government until all the presenters took their boards down and kicked us out. Good thing we had that random run-in because otherwise I’d never have been inclined to pick her out of a crowd.