Cultural Loneliness or "Affirmative Action"

On the school's web site I found a list of Ph. D. students in Risk Management. Of course, you could expect that I would interested in the names of my future colleagues, how many there were, etc.

There were about 12-18 names there. About 12-14 were clearly Chinese names. I suspect two were Korean names and two were either Indian or European names.
Which leads me to think that I might be the only Ph. D. student in Risk Management at my university who was born in the United States.

Being the only person who is from a given culture in a large group doesn't bother me that much -- I've done it before. I was an exchange student at a German university for one year. I hung around with, you guessed it, other exchange students. The dorm I stayed at was all exchange students, from Poland, Egypt, Spain, and elsewhere. We had to speak German because it was the only language all of us had in common.
Although, if the majority of my colleagues are going to be Chinese, I certainly wish I could speak some Chinese...I want to be as friendly as possible, and I know of at least one student who is coming from Beijing.

I'm definitely sure it must be lonely to be a non-native. I was lonely in Germany.

I told my wife about this, and she said, "you must have been the affirmative action hire". I rolled my eyes, and, given my incredible amount of self-doubt, prayed that that was not true.