Summer is a strange time for college students. After spending most of the year in the academic bubble, it can be a shock for us to return to our homes and succumb to intellectual brain freeze.

Summer internships can be stimulating, but for those who spend their summers scooping ice cream or playing dodgeball with 10-year-olds, there are few lessons to be learned.

Summer work can provide its own kind of education, though, by exposing students to the nitty-gritty of the working world.

The truth is, most of the world does not resemble the Brandeis campus, and part-time jobs can reveal this. I certainly understand this better after my own summer job experience.

This summer, I heeded the warnings of my elders who assured me that as a rising college sophomore, my chance of getting an internship in a field I was actually interested in were slim-to-none.

So I didn't bother applying to any, and instead I found a job waitressing at a small Middle Eastern restaurant in my suburban New Jersey town.

I was the only employee and, consequentially, often the only companion for my boss, Ahmed, the middle-aged Syrian man who owned and operated the restaurant. More often than not, the restaurant was quiet, which left us plenty of time to make small talk that occasionally grew into various political debates.

Our discussions grew contentious very quickly.

The most awkward by far was about Israeli politics a few days after the infamous Israeli Defense Forces flotilla raid. For the record, I consider myself fairly centrist regarding Israel, and though I am uncomfortable with the blanket implications of the label "Zionist," I advocate Israel's right to defend itself.

Anyway, the subject came up after we watched a report about the raid on Fox News (our respective tastes in media was also a source of contention). Ahmed was understandably disturbed by the consequences of the incident. He insisted, though, that the Israeli soldiers who boarded the Turkish ship were bloodthirsty monsters intent on killing defenseless Muslims.

It was 4 p.m. and about 95 degrees outside, and I was not in the mood for ineffectual debate, but it was impossible to ignore a statement like that. The conversation that ensued was incredibly frustrating.

I love to debate and really enjoy listening to other people's opinions. My discussion with Ahmed, though, tested my patience.

Many of his points during this conversation were typical of critics of Israel, so I had heard most of these before. It was his way of presenting them, though, which made our discussion so frustrating and bizarre.

He asked me how I would feel if a militia barged down my door and threatened to murder my family if we did not abandon our home at once.

This, he felt, was the position of the Palestinians who he believed had been forced to leave their land in the 1948 War of Independence. I tried to point out the nuances of the argument and show him this was an oversimplification, but he just shook his head at me and said, "This is not right. This is not right."

It was an impossible discussion, too emotional to end on any common understanding.

Our other conversations were less uncomfortable, though equally irritating.

Ahmed told me he did not "believe" in homosexuality. He was a religious Muslim who took the Quran literally and could not understand why God would make anyone gay. So he thought people who considered themselves gay were merely bored, attention-seekers or sexually promiscuous. He also doubted much of the theory behind evolution. Like many religious literalists, he refused to believe that humans and other primates share a common ancestor.

I have never had to seriously defend and explain the theory of evolution simply because I have never encountered anyone who doubted it. I realize I've been sheltered in this regard.

At Brandeis, I have met students and teachers with a wide variety of interesting and diverse opinions, but not any with opinions so different from my own.

Because of my lack of experience, I was almost entirely unprepared to defend myself and my ideas, and I ended up downloading slides Prof. Lawrence Wangh (BIOL) had left on the LATTE page from my spring biology class, which I used to walk my boss through some of the basic principles of Charles Darwin's theory of evoulution.

I eventually realized this was not an in-class debate among fellow students similarly well-versed in scholarly literature.

We were arguing from two entirely different personal perspectives, and my scripted talking points and desire to stick to arguments based on logic were useless in this new and uncomfortable setting.

My summer job was a wake-up call to the fact that many people do not share my beliefs, however mainstream they may be at my liberal college.

This may sound obvious, but until this experience I guess I had never understood the full implications of that truth.

Still, Ahmed and I learned from each other by exposing one another to foreign ways of thinking.

Though I did not take his ideas as my own, I learned from him how people from a certain context and culture see the world differently. I think he learned the same from me. And, to an extent, I can't really fault him for his beliefs, as I assume I would have the same ideas if I came from his background.

Maybe he would have felt differently about evolution if he had had a liberal arts education, or just a better science teacher. I guess it boils down to cultural relativity.

I also learned something very useful about myself.

I was able to see past our fundamental disagreements and appreciate the good qualities in Ahmed. Despite his views, I respected him. I was impressed by how he was able to run a business by himself and support his family in the U.S. in a country and a culture that were foreign to him. I never knew that I could respect and like someone whose beliefs were so contradictory to my own. And I'm sure I would never have had this grand realization if I had spent my summer stapling pages and making photocopies in an office instead. And even though my waitressing stint probably didn't do as much to plump my résumé as an internship would have, I can safely say I was given a true real-world experience this summer.