Finding comfort at home and here
I joke that I never really became a Californian until coming to Harvard. In many ways I fail to meet the stereotype. I don’t surf, I don’t really like the beach, I’m neither blond nor tan. Yet in my first semester at Harvard, I strove with all my might to adopt a certain coolness and mien that I thought was just Californian enough. I wanted to ensure that people knew where I was from. My freshman fall at Harvard brought me a plethora of new and exciting experiences. I took a course on LGBT literature, something unknown in my conservative, Catholic high school. I established friendships of remarkable depth and breadth, a feat I had not imagined possible in such a short span. I even met a Nobel laureate while walking back to my dorm one day — not a probable occurrence in suburban Orange County, Calif., which I call home. While...