Homeschooled from kindergarten through twelfth grade, I was increased in a typically Christian community that also happened to lean noteworthy conservative. Although I realized my parents’ political views and backgrounds before, I did not significantly begin looking at political concerns for me personally until the afterwards half of secondary school. Especially within the homeschool conversation and issue community, father or mother judges and coaches tended to express and sympathize the majority of with conventional viewpoints. However , given that most of our competition preparation centered on researching and debating current events, a lot of my colleagues and I found wonderful satisfaction in pondering politics questions and questioning politics decisions of the day.
Having the independence and space to engage in deep personal conversations by a young era was absolutely a advantage I had taken for granted until I found UC Berkeley. As I experienced expected, most students and instructors here held views enormously different from my very own. Navigating this sort of a different environment was not simply challenging in the beginning, but , most importantly, caused me to re-examine my political opinions and learn to articulate these questions clear method. Even in that case, I discovered that political biases and ideologies are extremely challenging to overcome. Specifically after Trump’s upsetting earn in the 2016 election, the overall climate among students and faculty was certainly one of distress and anger, and I sometimes pondered how many other students within my classes were also keeping silence out of fear of retaliation and misunderstanding.
Despite all probabilities, however , I discovered that good friends, even individuals with vastly diverse viewpoints, were often polite and relatively open-minded the moment political topics came up in personal conversations. Through individuals conversations, I started to discover that sharing my own views like a Berkeley student could make an impact, not just between fellow college students, but between friends and acquaintances outside of Berkeley too. This year, My spouse and i am honored to function as chief-of-staff for any student senator in UC Berkeley’s scholar government (the Associated Students of the University of California), and have experienced the opportunity to talk about and share my personal views concerning senate free speech promises. Although as being a conservative pupil at one of the liberal educational institutions in the land is certainly not without the challenges, I actually am impressed by the chance to grow and reinforce my beliefs in an oft-hostile environment, and am excited for foreseeable future growth and opportunities in the years to come.
