I often feel like an outsider wherever I go, so I’m always attracted to stories about identity and the meaning of home.
Chloe Zhao
When I received my acceptance letter to Berkeley, there was this overwhelming combination of shock and disbelief. I kept re-reading the email, just to be sure I hadn’t misunderstood. It was really addressed to me. They really were letting me in. Crazy talk.
The linguistics department is solid. The location is perfect. Also, bragging rights. There were so many ways in which this was a dream come true. But also, though, I was sure I was going to be so lonely. I was moving away from friends, from family, from the man I begrudgingly loved. I was giving up a lot for this dream school.
Also, with that name-brand prestige comes a population of smart kids. These kids were valedictorians with better than 4.0 GPAs (‘cause that’s a thing somehow). These are the kids who went to summer school not to make up their classes but to get ahead. I’m used to being the weird kid, a little bit on the fringe of every social group I work my way into; this was gonna be a next-level mismatch, though. I was about to submerge myself in academic overachievers less than half my age. It’s okay, I wasn’t going to Berkeley to make friends. I know the drill. Just keep my head down and get it done. I could make friends after graduation.
Berkeley was not what I expected. They weren’t kidding about looking for a resilient student body. They have a large and fairly well-supported population of transfer students. Before my first semester began, my inbox was filled with information for EOPS, student parents, transfer students, Latinx recruitment and retention, reentry students, etc. I have some criticism about how the university seems more keen to have black and brown students in marketing than in the classrooms, but that’s a whole other topic. For now, I just want to focus on the ways in which I found myself home on campus.
I have been making friends since my first semester on campus with surprising ease. These classes are hard. We bonded over the shared stresses, the shared geekery, and the simple happiness and seeing someone who seems happy to see you. Oddly, my time at Berkeley has been some of the least lonely days of my life. These nerds are my nerds. The friendships are somewhat subject-specific, but still so much more than I expected.
Still, I was nervous about Portugal. What if I ended up rooming with some poor girl who was so excited to get to be away from home finally and then got stuck with a roommate her mom’s age? My very existence could be a total buzzkill. I worried that everyone would be Portuguese or majoring in Portuguese, or eighteen years old, rich, worldly, or any combination of things I am definitely not. In the end, I think all those traits were present in the program, but not overwhelmingly. More definitive in the group were kindness, curiosity, and enthusiasm. We were all pretty excited to be in friggin’ Portugal for the summer.
Also, four of us were over forty. That was unexpected. I mean, I spent my entire childhood painfully aware that being the same age as someone was not enough common ground to forge a friendship. Still, undergrads in their forties had to take a windy path to get there. To completely bastardize Tolstoy, traditional students are all alike, but nontraditional students are nontraditional in their own unique way. I proceeded with caution, worried as always that at some point, I would be deemed just too weird to sit next to at lunch.
I love the kids that I went to Portugal with, no doubt. I have so much admiration for their intelligence, tenacity, and bravery. They are figuring stuff out so much earlier in life than I did, and I can’t wait to see how they change the world. It’s just that there is an incredible bond forged between us mature students. As I got to know them, I learned I was far from alone in having made choices I was not proud of along my way. There was so much I never felt like I had to explain when I was with them. They just got it.
I jokingly declared us The Real Cool Kids. We were the four musketeers. We were the Golden Girls, only with a cranky Korean man instead of an elderly Sicilian mother. Except we were, all four of us, too old for anybody else’s crap like Sophia, droppers of killer punchlines like Dorothy, sweet and kind like Rose, and known to have walked on the wild side like Blanche. Even if the trip had been without incident, which it definitely wasn’t, I would always love these people. After all that we’ve been through they are like family to me now.
Thank you for being a friend
Andrew Gold
Traveled down a road and back again
Your heart is true; you’re a pal and a confidant
Thank You for Being a Friend
Crystal, Clearly 
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