Imagine getting the acceptance letter to your dream college and feeling the excitement and relief of knowing that your continuous hard work and sacrifice paid off. Now imagine that this school is on the other side of the country and it would take two weeks to drive there or alternatively, approximately twenty-four hours to get there by airline travel.
It is no secret that going to college and making the transition is tough for everyone. You probably just graduated high school and now you have to be the captain of your own ship which means that you now have to be the one to hold yourself accountable for everything. You begin to wish that you had listened to all the advice that you were given by those around you as you were growing up because the real world is intimidating and now you have to figure this out by yourself.
In truth, parents and guardians are great – they raise you, buy you the things you need and want, and they are always there to pick you back up when you fall. Jumping into new ventures can be scary and no surprise here, colleges know this. That’s why there are “Family and Friends Weekends” and visitor parking lots on campuses, but what if your family can’t do this because of the distance? This means that you’re really on your own at that point and that’s tough – believe me, I know this firsthand.
Home for me is 4,000 miles away – right smack dab in the middle of the Last Frontier, where I live in the small town of Healy, Alaska, with a year-round population of about 1,000 people. We’re a twenty-minute drive from Denali National Park and Preserve, and if you don’t work for the school district or the park, you probably work for our coal mine or the power plant. There really isn’t too much more to the place and to offer you some perspective: the high school graduating class of 2018, had only twelve people in it, myself included.
So, this is my way of saying that I am no stranger to the strangeness and intimidating factors that come with figuring out a new place sans your support system there physically with you. Living with a four-hour time difference between them and myself doesn’t make anything easier and as a result, you have to learn how to adapt and fast. You have to be the one to hold yourself accountable because now no one else is there to get on you to clean your room or do your laundry – you have to be the one to do it, and truthfully getting thrown into all of this is hard because as everyone knows being an adult is even harder.
However, thankfully, colleges have tons of programs available on their campuses to help new students, you just have to look for them, even if it’s a simple thing like joining a new organization or club on campus to make friends. I was never one to be very good at doing that because new people intimidate me, and that’s okay. Doing things at your own pace is important, and although it may seem like you are completely in this by yourself, just because your family is on the other side of the continent, doesn’t mean that you’re truly alone.
Now, this isn’t to say that I have figured it all out, although I had to discover pretty quickly how to get into Blackboard or to pick up my textbooks and even how to reload funds onto my MaineCard all by myself. I was never able to go to any of the open houses or even a campus tour before I got here and like a few of my peers, my first time seeing the campus was Freshman move-in day. Trying to learn all of this by yourself is hard work and I’m the type of person who dislikes asking others for help because I know that I can figure it out eventually- or at least that’s what I tend to think.
In time I have learned that asking for help is okay and it’s an important part of growing up, and let’s face it, we’re all still growing up even if we think we have it all figured out! I am in the spring of my Sophomore year now and I wish that when I was a freshman, there was some article that I could read that gave me all of the answers that I needed for every single issue- even though the most important part, is learning these lessons for yourself.
Being so far from home is really hard, and that’s true whether home is twenty minutes away, or 20,000 miles away. We are all still children in a lot of ways and honestly, we’re all just trying to figure out this adult thing for ourselves, but maybe if we’re a bit more open with each other, we might just make it.