This is the standard 2000s movie high school (left) looking suspiciously similar to ours (right). Photo graphic courtesy from reporter Mara de Blas Villarán.

  Students at San Luis Obispo High School walk, talk, and act as if concrete walls stood between their different cliques. This seems similar to genetic drift in natural selection terms, as if assumptions were “evolving” in these, caused by the frequency of a characteristic.

  It’s also similar to the iconic cafeteria scenes in every American high school 2000s movie such as “Mean Girls” with their iconic “jocks, nerds, goths, preps, etc.” Subconsciously, different industries have immersed the public into this phenomenon.

  It’s not only about the social hierarchy anymore, people genuinely dislike each other based on the “type of kid” they are.

  “On occasions, people think that theater kids and band kids will be annoying, and with sports that they are mean or not smart, which isn’t always true,” said sophomore Jude Biggers.

  It can be hard to identify this issue when most students are part of it and don’t even realize it. Using these terms is considered an easy way to identify different activities and those who participate in them, simply defining how they choose to spend their free time.

  “There are people who are in theater, people who are in band, I bet they would even consider themselves theater or band kids, which doesn’t mean a bad thing, but it shows who they are,” said senior Trevor Gardner.

  This might seem trivial at first, and I must agree it is harmless: establishing friendships through hobbies and passions is not the problem; instead, the issue is the stereotypes that emerge from it.

  “People look down on each other because of their own biases, and then they use the activities that people do to justify that,” said junior Wesley Bartlett.

  Yes, while it could be true that sometimes personal reasons cause different people to use others’ cliques to criticize them, most times it is caused directly by the connotations that have appeared for these expressions through countless years of separation between groups.

  “Sometimes, people just think, because I play sports, I don’t really know what I’m doing in class,” said senior Ian Cabrinha.

  However, there are exceptions to the rule, when students finally dare to do something outside of their comfort zone and discover that individuals they usually would have never approached, are actually a perfect match for them,

  “I’ve opened myself to new things lately, and I’m so happy that I’ve gotten the opportunity to meet so many new friends that I know I can count on and have fun with; even though I probably would have judged them too quickly based on their clique if I had met them in the past,” said freshman Madalyn Purdy.

  Life is too short to miss out on chances to meet new people, so be sure to approach that someone you usually never talk to, they might surprise you! Knock down those concrete walls between us, because, at the end of the day, we are all just Tigers.