I wasn't prepared for the flurry of questions, comments and exclamations from my new volleyball club teammates when I introduced myself and mentioned where I went to high school.

"Oh my god!" "Aren't you scared to go to school every morning?" "Have you ever been shot at?" "Have you ever dated a black guy?" "Are you a gangster?"

I laughed it off, joked around, and as practice started the conversations died down. But as the season went on, I couldn't shake it. Whenever I'd walk in the gym, I'd be expected to tell a new story about what happened at school that day. Any news of a shooting? Wow, kids caught doing drugs in the bathroom? Gang wars with a rival school? They ate it up like it was just another MTV show.

And I began to not like it. I stopped being able to just joke about it and shake it off. I felt like I was experiencing discrimination first hand. But how was that possible? On the outside, I looked exactly like these girls. I'm white. I'm blonde. I live in a well-to-do family. I have two parents who are still together. My life is pretty much in place. But there is one difference that sets us worlds apart. The majority of the girls on my team go to a suburban school with a homogenous white student body population. I attend Garfield High School, an ethnically mixed public school located right in the middle of the Central District in Seattle.

Garfield has been called the melting pot of the Seattle Public Schools. Students from every background imaginable are drawn here for a chance to receive an education that rivals the best in the nation. Every day I pass people in the hallways who come from different backgrounds. Every day I sit next to someone from a different culture. By simply being around this kind of diversity, I am in a position to learn about and respect people who are in some ways very different from me. This extraordinarily valuable lesson -- accepting people and their differences -- was not taught and is not measured by GPA or the SAT. I learned it incidentally at Garfield, simply by being in a diverse environment every day.

Of course, diversity is not always an easy thing. Garfield has been heavily criticized by many who believe that because of our diversity, our academics are unfairly segregated. The ever-present "Two Garfields" metaphor has been the topic of many local newspaper articles addressing the gap between the higher-achieving, AP-taking, mainly white Garfield, and the less-academic, mainly minority Garfield. However, students at Garfield are very aware of this issue and are hard at work to bridge the divide.

During my junior year at Garfield, I became involved with a student-run program called Cultural Relations. Every year the leadership of Cultural Relations, or "CORE", conducts a retreat for all interested students where they discuss diversity issues from racism and sexism to stereotypes and the achievement gap. This retreat was one of the most incredible, eye-opening experiences of my life. People I had known for years began sharing deeply personal stories of the hardships they were going through. The quiet kid in my physics class had a suicidal mother. The girl whose locker was right next to mine cut herself. The junior class president was a victim of rape. This retreat had the same effect on me that it’s known for having on everyone: it raised my level of awareness about the problems that affect us all, but that we often keep private. Participants are forced to step back and look at everything and everybody, with a new pair of eyes - - eyes that see past what's on the surface and into a person's core. This program taught me not to judge and jump to conclusions about people, because there could be many reasons and personal issues that have caused them to be the way they are.

Touched so deeply by this experience, I applied to become a CORE leader and I was selected for my senior year. Now I am able to help others to experience what I experienced last year and, with them, to help make Garfield a more accepting and unified environment. CORE is an amazing example of Garfield's determination to change and of its willingness to confront the problems that the media has pointed out. We are not simply sitting by and complaining about our problems; we are actively involved in addressing them.

As I learned on the first day of my volleyball club practice, going to school in a diverse, inner-city environment might be an intimidating prospect for some. But I have learned that that the rewards are great. Because we confront so many social problems, issues, and controversies first-hand, we are able to learn how to deal with them. I know that my experiences at Garfield High School have prepared me well for the future by providing me with a more realistic portrayal of the society that I want to live in.

 This essay was written by Britt Thorson, Garfield Class of 2007, University of Southern California Class of 2011.