(June 10, 2001) — Joking about the faculty and how “bus 108 has just arrived,” cliques of friends exchanged witty remarks and laughed at inside jokes during the very first school year at Clark. Whether cliques were separated by common interests, race or by the home schools they came from, each group of friends was tightly bound together. Students shared inside jokes that led to endless bursts of laughter that would cause any “outsider” not from the group to cock their heads in question. Senior Philip Muñoz noted how for the first few months everyone hung around with people they already knew from their home schools and later they would “link up” if they found common interests with new friends. According to senior Vilen Begoyan, it was either that students found they shared “Dungeons and Dragons” as a common interest and spent hour after hour huddled in a small group playing each other or their cultural background and race brought strangers from different schools together. Begoyan said that always having a chance to interact and socialize was a benefit of having cliques and “because the school was pretty small, all the seniors got to know each other.” In contrast, senior Gary Hill said that the “mingling” of cliques didn’t start until the second year. “I hung around people I already knew from C.V.,” continued Hill. Gary’s friend Adam Wing added that it wasn’t intentional but rather because students came from different schools, they tend to stick to people they were familiar with. Wing said that during the first year, the amphitheatre was the only open area and all the individual groups were basically confined to the same place. It was only later when after the tables were added that the more “dominant” and bigger groups began to leave the amphitheatre and cluster around the tables. As for whether the majority of these cliques were constructive, Wing said that the ones that were segregated by race were “unhealthy” because they limited the level of interaction. Cliques brought together by shared interests were “okay because [the students] shared a common passion,” Wing said. Cliques, “homies,” or whatever other names they can be referred to—the strongly nestled groups of friends offered a comfort zone to fall back on in times of need.