As the spring semester winds to a close, and the weather finally agrees not to be bipolar, students at the University of Maryland prepare to take finals and head home for the summer. For many, it’s exciting to get out of school. However, leaving college for three months isn’t quite the same as it was in high school. Many students must come to terms with the fact that they’ll miss being in College Park, though it’s not the classes or the stress of finals they’ll be missing.
“[I’ll miss] the convenience,” Grant Johnson III, a senior geographic information science major, said. “Having everything so close and around you all the time, there’s always something to do on campus. Going home … I’ll just be sitting around the house.” Home for Grant is Columbus, Ohio, where – although he’ll miss UMD – he’s excited to see his family again. “There’s just something about having all these people around,” he said.
Joseph Horwitz, a freshman criminology major, will also miss his time spent on campus when he’s back home in Chicago, Illinois. For him it’s “the atmosphere that Maryland provides, the friendly vibes [and] the nice weather.”
For some, like Jack McCarty, home isn’t quite as far away. He lives in Poolesville, Maryland. “I’ll be visiting Maryland a lot,” McCarty, a freshman engineering major, said. He’ll miss “freedom [from] my parents, and being able to do whatever I want and not having to come back because it’s 5 a.m.”
Freshman Sara Kettler only has to go as far as Takoma Park, Maryland, to be home. “[I’ll miss] the having food prepared for me and available,” she laughed. “I’ll also miss my friends.”
Friends and acquaintances will be missed most of all by the students at UMD. “I will also miss my friends and the relationships I have with acquaintances and professors,” Horwitz said.
Senior Stephen Tursi, a civil engineering major, is moving to Baltimore after graduation for a job. He has years worth of things to miss at UMD but mostly “all the people and being around so many people with similar interests and passions of mine,” he said. “Moving to Baltimore, it’ll be exciting but I feel like you’re not going to get that same type of student body experience.”
Ali Zhang is only a freshman, but she knows the feeling. “I live in Easton so I’ll miss seeing people on my hall who I’m not going to live with next year,” she said. “I’m going to live with my roommates, I think, again next year but it won’t be the same seeing everybody in the hallway walking around.”
While many students have to say good-bye to their friends and the atmosphere of UMD over the summer, others don’t need to worry.
“I’m doing a summer program this summer, language institute, in Arabic,” freshman computer science and linguistics double major Stephanie Pomrenke said. “I have a lot of friends who are also staying on campus because of classes or because they live out of state and don’t want to go back and forth a ton.”
Aanchal Domalapally, a sophomore community health major, is also staying on campus over the summer for “research.” Instead of missing all of her friends, she’s going to miss “my family, seeing as during the school year I’m here most of the time.”