Despite the great variation in my academic experience as I made my way through the echelons of formal education, one invariant has curiously remained: I was always alone. Not in the sense of having no friends, as I’ve always had 1 or 2 close friends, and have made more since college, nor due to an inability to socialize, but in terms of academic study groups, idea passing, and generally communicating with other people about my work. It isn’t that I can’t do it – quite the contrary; I found out that I could pass ideas very effectively when I began to tutor – but rather due to the fact that I usually tend to find myself in a social group all my own. In grade school, I was so unpopular that I was picked on even by the people at the bottom of the social ladder. In college, I tended to provide help rather than ask for it, there were only 6 of us, and I barely studied in any case (yes, the same college that I graduated from with the highest GPA in my class – not only did I get a 3.96, but did it without studying). In graduate school, the classes are slightly harder in places, though I still barely study, but race has now become the dividing factor. I’m literally the only American student in the classroom, and as soon as the professor walks out, different conversations begin in all sorts of different languages, but never in English). All of the students are nice and polite people to work with, and will converse in English if I speak to them, but it’s clear that they’d prefer to associate within their social group.

And that leaves me. Alone on the top of my class. Again.

I don’t know whether being forced to derive my own answers has enhanced or diminished my abilities, but it has certainly become a key component of my academic identity regardless.