Sorting Houses

Business, medical, hospitality, and fine arts. Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Slytherin, and Ravenclaw. Charlotte, Miranda, Carrie, and Samantha. Coffee, tea, soda, and energy drinks. While there might be countless Buzzfeed quizzes to help you sort yourself, I would like to think we are all immensely different despite being in the same sorting house.

People tend to love categories. We love to be sorted—or at least we love to do the internal sorting ourselves. For those who have not done the Pottermore sorting house quiz, there are pretty fine lines between which house you fall into. In a nutshell: Slytherin = evil, Gryffindor = brave, Hufflepuff = nice, Ravenclaw = smart. So, it is rather easy to dupe your answer and sort yourself into the house you want. In other sorting houses like college degrees and Sex and the City characters, they are not as defined. While I am a firm believer that our degrees do not define us, they do provide a bit of a window into the person. I only believe this now that I have graduated because, good god, four years of a subject you don't care for seems like hell. I am the happy owner of an English B.A., but no I will not be using it to become a teacher—the common career route with that degree. However, it does gives the a peek into the window of myself, a person who lives to read and write. I have friends who are business majors who could give a rats ass about business, but simply seek the safety net behind a stable degree—thus providing the window showing their yearn for steady reliable careers. Given the average core four, (to my understanding) that college degrees are usually sorted into—business, medical, hospitality, and fine arts—believe me there will be 100 business majors with 100 different views on the outcome of the degree. More than that, there will be 100 different career paths. Sorting houses have the habit of being quite extensive with an overall theme. A business degree is the broad one. Slytherin is the evil one. Miranda is the pragmatic one. Fine Arts is the degree that parents usually hate to hear, etc. etc. Yet it can be understood that sorting houses are built this way in order to have a melting pot of morals, goals, ideologies, and perceptions in order to influence their members for the better. A round table discussion for a random orientation will end with you knowing more than you did when you walked in. No one wants a friend group or college club that just has carbon-copy clones of the same person eleven times—with individuality, even in small doses, emerge the best events.

As usual, a poll amongst groupchats has indeed been conducted and I feel they prove my point and emphasize some others. I have a friend who is studying nursing in order to become a travel doctor and classifies himself as: Medical, Hufflepuff, Samantha, and Coffee. This tracks pretty well honestly, even though a year ago he was 100% a Charlotte. This one survey answer boldens the idea that you are not the same sorting house you were a year ago—thousands of unnoticeable factors have embedded themselves within you that you grow without realizing it. I have another friend who I THINK earned a business degree, is a Slytherin, drinks coffee, and although she has never seen Sex and the City—as I am sure several of you reading this also haven't—I know her well enough to say she 100% is a Miranda. I also got a surplus of answers saying they were tea drinking Charlotte's which ties into the perception factor of a sorting house. Everyone wants the cutest character, everyone wants the best Harry Potter house, but how you are understood by others plays into your sorting house more than you think it does. I had an ex-friend who thought she was being funny but she was just rude. I had a classmate who thought he was very philosophical and all-knowing but came off as just a douche who refuses to have a normal conversation.

Sorting houses also tie in to our non-negotiables. Whether relationship related or not, common or not, we do have underlying non-negotiables that further layer those sorting houses. I have a friend who categorized herself as: Ravenclaw, Samantha, Medical degree (yes psychology technically is in this category) and Coke, however has a super strong non-negotiable rule of no outside-clothes in the bed. And also the more people I asked about their non-negotiables, the more common I found that rule to be. I relayed the instances where I have been tired after work and will float easily into my bed fully clothed and was met with several audible gasps. I digress, I have another friend who listed religion as a non-negotiable and I realized that it counts as a sorting house in its own way. You choose a sorting house surrounded my those with similar morals and ideologies but ideally never cookie-cutter pastes of the same person. It also helps to realize how many people are in that house for thousands of different reasons. This then ties into sonder—the intrigue behind every person you see who has their own reasons for being, unknown to you. You see someone in front of you in line at Publix and wonder what they go home to, or if they are excited for the holidays coming up, or what might be stressing them out at the moment. Or when you meet someone at the exact same job fair as you but have goals that completely oppose yours.

Whether the sorting house be fictional, astrological, political, or simple beverages, we are all independently different despite the house we sort into. Those thousands of independent differences are shaped from thousands of different reasons, and I personally like to believe that that's a good thing. Don't sort yourself into a cult of clones. Should you join a group, or start a job, or simply take up a new morning drink of choice, at least acknowledge and listen to what each house and each member of it has to say.