The inevitabilities of being a Cal Poly freshman: late nights in the dorms, attempting to learn neighbors’ faces when they wave as they walk past your window and Friday night VGs runs.
North Mountain, a cluster of relatively spacious engineering dorms with a scattered amount of other majors, is my new home. The Palomar-Whitney lawn is host to slack-liners, studiers, martial artists and nappers. Every day, San Luis Obispo’s ridiculously perfect weather brings out students from every building within North Mountain, and friendships grow quickly as the quarter passes. Friends literally come to your door — sometimes, your friends from your WOW group have a roommate who was in your roommate’s WOW group, bringing people together and making should-be awkward situations into easy, fun meetings.
According to my friends in classes and especially in North Mountain, homesickness is not an issue. How can you be homesick when you love your new home so much?
As every upperclassman knows, it’s quite an adjustment getting used to dorm life, your first quarter of college and your first extended period away from home. No one is there to tell you to be home by 11, no one is making sure you’re eating healthy, and no one knows whether you’re digging yourself into a neck-deep hole of books that should have been read instead of staying up until 3 a.m. in Lassen. But there is no freedom without mistakes. Besides, that ludicrous three a.m. caffeine-induced night may just have made formed a lifelong friendship.
But no matter how much you love your dorm, your new friends or your freedom, you will still miss things from your first home. Some of them are complex and some are very simple. For example, you could miss the way your mom woke you up on Sunday morning because it was almost noon (though you hated it at the time). And you could also miss the luxury of showering without shoes. We all, of course, terribly miss home-cooked meals (so much). You miss your high school friends, but you’ve got exciting new relationships to form here. You miss your pets, but you’ve got raccoons, deer, rabbits, cows, horses and the occasional bear here. You miss the relative ease of high school homework, but the 24-hour study lounge in Kennedy Library is more fun than you would expect. What seems lost has only been replaced with something else. And the general feeling on campus is that the switch went in the right direction.
Some of us went across the country and others went to Salinas, but going home on Thanksgiving and/or winter break proved to be just as much of an adjustment as moving away to college. It’s hard not being able to run across the lawn and knock on your best friend’s door whenever you want, or have a rowdy dinner with friends at Metro, or run down to the farmer’s market.
Happiness arose at the thought of home-cooked food and barefoot showers, but being in this familiar yet distant environment was a lot different from the dorm life that you had grown to love. And that’s when the realization comes that you’re not a kid away from home because you’re in college; you’re a kid who’s moved to a new home.
Coming to Cal Poly was a conscious decision we all made last May. For the overwhelming majority of us, it only took one quarter to know you had made a damn good decision, and it won’t take too much more to know it may have been the best decision made thus far in your life.