“I don’t want to talk to him, he’s weird!” That is what a lot of kids would say about someone before they came to Mount Michael. In general, most kids tend to hang around with kids like themselves. That is not the case at the Mount, students at Mount Michael have to be more open to different kinds of people or else they will not have many friends at all.

An underrated advantage of coming to the Mount is that you gain friends that you would have never given a chance before. Everyone has seen the typical high school movie with the jocks in one group, the arts people in another, etc.; but that is the opposite of the Mount. Senior John Lundgren said,” Before I came here I figured I would just hang around with the kids who were as sports-oriented as I was, but living with all my classmates has made me more open to all kinds of people.”

The students are by no means the same, but at the same time there is very little division amongst a class. That is a rare find in a high school, and it has made many people more open-minded. Senior Seth Witulski said,” I have become good friends with people who I would not have even given the time of day to before I came here.”

Students at Mount Michael do not only make friends with other people from the same background, they also get to know about a whole new culture. The normal culture of Midwestern kids mixes with the Korean culture. When most students are first exposed to this, they tend to view the Korean students as Koreans that are their classmates, but after living with them for two or three years they become classmates that just happen to be Korean. The same can be said by the Koreans, like senior Ryan Nho, who said, “I have become better friends with American students than I ever thought I could have been before I came here.” There are not many high schools that can say they have that unique interaction between two different cultures.

The small class size and living with those few classmates helps students become friends with almost all their classmates. The friendships that Mount Michael students build are not the typical friendship that most people would have. After going to the Mount for four years the saying “it is like we are brothers” starts to set in and students start to believe it.                                                                                                      - Mike Schulte