I grew up in suburban Philadelphia, in a county where there are twice as many registered Republicans as Democrats.

I went to middle school with Richard Nixon's granddaughter.

Come election night, maps of my area are inevitably shaded red as another public office goes to a Republican.

But it's not exactly a conservative enclave -- the votes tend to go Republican because it's an affluent area.

People vote Republican for the tax breaks, not necessarily the social issues. My mother, for instance, changes her political affiliations every time she changes income brackets.

So until I came to Penn State, I had no clue that true conservatives actually existed, besides Rush Limbaugh. My view of Republicans was courtesy of my local White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs), people who voted for Congressman Curt Weldon because he favors privatizing Social Security and a flatter tax. Sure, I came across pro-lifers and maybe the occasional person who was opposed to gay marriage. But that was it as far as my political diversity went.

Still, I felt politically stifled in my money-driven Republican town. I was looking forward to college, which, in my mind, was a liberal paradise, where everyone agreed that welfare was necessary to help people on hard times, that marijuana should be legalized and that war wasn't the answer.

And then I arrived at Penn State.

The vast majority of my friends were, well, the Moral Majority, as Rev. Jerry Falwell might say.

They were pro-life. They thought unions interfered with productivity and profit. They had faith that school prayer would unite students.

They were convinced that welfare was for the lazy. They believed in preemptive warfare. They believed that even if you didn't support the war in Iraq, you should keep quiet to "support the troops."

Some of them didn't even believe in evolution. I was a dove in a hawk's nest.

I felt like the only liberal around. I was amazed to find out that conservatives here felt that they were "oppressed." If they thought they were a minority, they needed to talk to me. I had some people for them to meet.

Dinner would, without fail, turn into a political discussion. And by discussion, I mean, "Let's all attack the crazy liberal."

"How can you be pro-choice but anti-death penalty? Kill the innocent and save the guilty?"

"How can you support affirmative action? Doesn't it just pigeon-hole minorities?"

"How can you be in favor of gun controls and against the right of students to pray?"

"How can you want schools to teach kids about contraception? Don't you have any morals?"

And on it went. At first, I failed miserably. My friends had conservative arguments I had never heard before. To them, I was just another bleeding heart liberal.

I kept thinking of what Winston Churchill said: "Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains."

I became concerned that maybe heart and brains didn't mix in politics -- and I was definitely all heart.

So I did research.

I soaked in every piece of policy news mentioned in the New York Times and ignored friends who insisted it is a liberal paper.

Last year, during a debate about Iraq, I mentioned falsified documents used to claim that Iraq had tried to purchase yellowcake uranium. My friends laughed at me. They swore it had never happened -- our government wouldn't tell the public lies.

One for the bleeding heart liberal, zero for the conservatives.

The best diversity education I've received here has probably been from my conservative friends. Their continuous efforts to turn me right actually pushed me further left.

Until I came to Penn State, I thought that most liberal issues were moot points. I thought that many of these "problems" had been solved long ago, by court decisions declaring a woman's body her own, flag burning a freedom of expression and school prayer oppressive to already stifled religious minorities.

Now I know that these rights are in jeopardy or even have been taken away. And now I know how to debate effectively without looking like a blithering idiot. According to GI Joe, knowing is half the battle.

The rest of the battle is continuing to talk and exchange ideas with my conservative friends.

I can help fight the rest of the battle -- heart, brains and all.