In college, I was more politically conservative than most of my friends. But in hindsight, I'm unsure of whether that's what I believed, or whether it came from my instinct to be a contrarian, especially because I've had the opposite experience in business school. For example, when debating healthcare reform, discussions in college typically centered around pragmatics; while in business school, debates have been about whether healthcare is something that government should be providing at all.
If given the choice, I prefer being the token liberal. As the token conservative, I get frustrated when arguments (mine or theirs) are dismissed simply because we disagree about the validity of each other's evidence. I find it more stimulating to see where our values differ and to test whether we're comfortable pushing our values to their logical conclusions.
Which side do you prefer?