Holy Cross students are lucky enough to have a fall break that lasts a whole week, which gives us more time to be in our hometowns with friends and family that we have missed since starting college. As a freshman coming home for the first time after nearly 2 months, I felt strange to say the least, especially when I walked into my childhood bedroom and saw how low my bed was and I realized I didn’t have to share a bathroom with 12 other girls. It’s differences like these that make me think about how separate my home life is from my school life.Â
I am from suburban NY, so for one of my home friends’ birthdays, we planned to go into the city for dinner— all of my home friends were going to be together after much too long. We hopped on the train and went straight to Grand Central. At dinner, we all went around the table and played the game “Rose, Bud, Thorn” of our college experience thus far. (Click here if you aren’t familiar with the Rose, Bud, Thorn game). When it was my turn, I started telling stories about my new friends at school and funny things that had happened to us. I quickly realized that my home friends had no idea what I was talking about. Not only had they never met these new people, but none of them had ever even been to the Holy Cross campus. It was strange to me that these girls, who know me so well and whom I love so much, don’t know anything about this new phase of my life or all the important people who are now part of it. It was such a weird and startling realization.Â
How do you solve this problem that we all likely experience? To be sure, my home friends are also trying to get settled into school and find their people there, so it seems like a universal problem.
To try to bridge the gaps and address this challenge, my (home) friends and I hold these structured calls we refer to as “bi-monthlies”. On these calls, we carve out time, twice a month, where we join a group FaceTime and spend about 2 hours telling stories and listening to each other’s experiences. Not only is it meant to keep me caught up with my friends’ lives, but it also allows me to tell them about what I am experiencing, and who and what has become important to me. So far, it has worked quite well and I think we all look forward to these sessions to catch up.
All in all, if you are as lucky as I am to have so many people worth missing and so many new friends that have made my college experience so great, it’s worth it to try to find ways to bring the two groups together. It is a gift to have people you miss wherever you go, and by being able to share all our new experiences and reminisce about the old ones, we can bring the different parts of our lives a little closer together.