Can Two Strangers Actually Have a Real Conversation About the Big Stuff?

Educators and students new to the Civic Gym often have the same questions: will this be useful for my students in their chosen major? Can two strangers have a truly productive conversation about big issues, especially when they disagree? Will this conversation be impactful beyond this one assignment? So we went directly to the source, speaking to three students who have participated in the Civic Gym, sometimes multiple times.

Meet our three students: Rima Shah, a business and music student at the College of DuPage, and Victoria Nwankwo, a sociology and African-American studies major at Emory University. We also spoke with a third student, who prefers to remain anonymous.

Each student walked in with a different background: different majors, different institutions, different cultural upbringings, different reasons for being there in the first place. Despite that, their experiences lined up in some monumental ways. 

Ripping off the bandaid

Two of the three students we spoke with described political conversation as something they'd grown up avoiding, for their own wellbeing. And this is a common refrain for many participants: in Spring 2026, 60% of our participating students reported that they didn’t have much structured practice having real conversations with people who think differently. 

Our anonymous student described growing up in a family that treated politics with caution, not indifference. Their family's approach, shaped by their experience as immigrants, was to keep a low profile: "our whole thing is like keep your head down and just... put food on the table... don't cause waves." This wasn't out of disinterest or apathy; political topics, in their words, were treated as things that could "burn you" if you weren't careful. They were nervous enough walking into their first Challenge that they waited outside in their car before going in.

Rima Shah described a similar hesitation, rooted in her own upbringing: "coming as someone who has Indian parents and was born here, I have always been really nervous about sharing my political views." She also remembers being nervous before her first conversation, worried about how the other person might view her.

This is a common refrain from almost every Civic Gym participant — they're anxious about getting into a fight with their partner, or worried about being judged. But, like with most things, the anxiety is worse than the reality. The conversations are rarely as contentious as social media or the news would suggest; students usually end up finding common ground, learning something new, and feeling more confident about their next conversation.

Victoria put it best: “I always try to tell people that it's not as nerve-wracking as it seems. You're talking to a random person over the phone about politics, which, you know, is a little bit taboo, but it's it's not as bad as it seems”

Now, this one conversation wasn’t a silver bullet. Rima made it clear that she's still selective about where she shares her views – as she put it: "I'm not going to state it out on my Instagram" — but both students became more willing to have the conversation at all. Our anonymous student said they left their first Challenge "energized" rather than guarded, in a way they hadn't expected going in.

What does “different” actually mean?

The Civic Gym matches students across differences for a conversation. Let’s talk about what we mean by “difference”. When people think of being matched "across difference," most think of two things: “political differences” followed closely by "contentious”. 

First things first: political difference is just one of the 8-9 points of difference that can shape how students view and move through the world. We match across backgrounds, campuses, and beliefs to make sure that students get the most out of the conversation. So while politics may be the first thing that comes to mind, sometimes it's those other differences that make the impact.

In one event, our anonymous student was matched with a student from Florida who shared a similar background, also being from an immigrant family and a community college student. That geographic and demographic difference, while unexpected, was extremely valuable to our student: "people just assume these conversations always need to happen between people who are ideologically different. But I think you can learn a lot also from talking to people who are geographically different, maybe demographically different."

Now the second fear: contention. Even when students are matched across political differences, it's not nearly as vicious as people might imagine. Rima put it well: "we always have the fights — like, 'oh, you're either on this side or this side' — but really, when it comes down to it, when you start breaking down the fundamentals, there's a lot of things that you really can agree on."

Our anonymous student's language echoed it almost exactly when describing being matched with someone very different. They were matched once with a peer from West Virginia — a background they described as about as far from their own urban, immigrant upbringing as they could imagine. They expected to find little in common. Instead, they said the conversation on gun control and immigration was "nuanced" and not the "clickbait" extremes they'd braced for. In fact, they found that they had a lot of common ground, saying “I actually thought the person I talked to was really cool. And I could see us being friends, you know?”

Without being asked to compare notes, both students arrived at close to the same conclusion from their matches: we're not as opposed as we're led to believe.

Neither student described this as a change in their own political position. Rima, asked directly whether any Civic Gym event had changed her mind on an issue, said no: "I don't think there was any that made me change my belief on anything." What changed for her was her confidence and willingness to have a political conversation — a sense that the conversation was survivable and even worthwhile.

The impact one conversation can have

When we talk about the Civic Gym, we usually talk about skill-building — critical thinking, communication, working across difference. While those are certainly important, plain exposure to policy and political concepts did something for each of these three students on its own.

Victoria, on a pre-law track, now says she wants that law degree to lead into policy work — "maybe even running for office one day" — and has started taking more policy and quantitative coursework since getting involved with Unify America, an involvement that includes both the Civic Gym and her seat on the National Student Advisory Board. Our anonymous student credits the Civic Gym with giving them the practice — and the comfort — to sit with hard conversations instead of avoiding them. And Rima, a business and music-industry major with no prior interest in civic work, kept coming back to the Civic Gym anyway, and eventually found herself teaching other students how to read a ballot during a presidential election.

None of them, to our knowledge, had this planned out when they started college.

So, back to our starting question: can one conversation make a difference? For these three students, and thousands more, it certainly did. One hour-long conversation won’t make someone a civic dialogue expert. It may not change their political stances. But for each of our students, one event was enough to get more comfortable having a hard conversation and give them a slightly wider view of someone “different”. And that one shift in comfort opened onto something much bigger, in different ways: a different course focus, a new approach to volunteering, a reason to teach a stranger how to read a ballot. One conversation didn't hand any of them a new career or a new belief, but it made the next conversation easier — and for these students, that was enough to change where the rest of college, and the years after, actually took them.