For a majority of your life, your home is the house in which you live. When you go home, it is to the address in which you are so very used to living at. However, once you get to college, home gets to be a confusing thing. This past year, I moved from Chicago to Philadelphia to attend my first year at Jefferson. Being twelve hours away from my home and not knowing anyone going into college was very weird at first. The biggest help for me to begin feeling comfortable at school was getting involved.
I run cross country and track at Jefferson, so I quickly met people from the team during our first week of training together. I joined HerCampus and the choir in the fall and then pledged for Phi Psi in the spring. Each of these groups have allowed me to explore my interests with people who also share those interests. Another benefit from getting involved with sports, clubs, and frats on campus is meeting people in different years than you. One of my best friends is going to be a fifth year architecture major next year, and I would never have met her if I had not joined what I did.
With schoolwork, sports, and clubs, my life at school quickly became busy and fulfilling. With so much going on, it was hard to miss “home”. But, according to the maps on my phone, home had changed. If I was off campus and getting directions back to school, all I had to do was click on home and we were on our way. For a long time, I did not think of my dorm room as home. Throughout the spring semester, however, I began to understand how home isn’t just a place. There are many sayings out there, but they can be consisted to summarize that home is not a place but it is a feeling. Over the year here, my friends have been my family at school. Whether it was a death in the family, a bad grade, or just a bad week, we were there for each other like family was.
All of my friend group lives within about a three to five minute walk from each other. I think that this experience of being so close to your friends and being available at all hours of the day truly only exists during freshman year. People move further away, and even if you live together, freshman dorm-style housing breeds a bond that is only replicable in siblings. Having friends you can count on in any way makes a place feel more comfortable and more home.
For me, school, rather than my house in Illinois, has been my main “home” for the months that I have been here. But home really resides in the people that you create it with. So when I am with my family, no matter where we are, I feel at home. My friends are all scattered for the summer, so home is somewhat scattered with them, just as home stayed with my family when I left. I am not worried about feeling out of place at home or at school, or anywhere else I go, because if I am with the people I love then home comes with me.