I scoff when my mother insists on making my bed while I unpack all of my things. She takes her time, unloading the brand new extra-long twin bed sheets and flattening them out against the dark blue mattress. After she gets the bed sheets on she pulls the comforter over the bed and places all of my stuffed animals neatly on top of the twenty extra blankets I brought with me. Dad sits on the edge of the other bed watching the two of us with a strange smile on his face. Later, when mom insists on taking me to Walmart to buy pillows since mine were forgotten at home, Dad and I will laugh at her.

“Do you want a pop?” she asks me, and I see the tears welling up in her eyes. I nod and she walks past the cashier to grab a Mountain Dew for me.

I smile up at my father and say, “I’m only 45 minutes away. If that.” Then I look at her. “Momma I’ll be fine. I’m not the first of yours to move out.”

“I know,” she says through her tears.

When we get back to campus I know that I’m minutes away from being all alone at a college. A college where I don’t have my best friend, my band geeks or my family. And as I watch my parents drive off in my dad’s diesel a subtle loneliness creeps in. What am I thinking? Going away to a school so far away that I have to live on campus. I don’t know anyone here. I’m not going to last a week here. I couldn’t even bring myself to go to the cafeteria for food because the social anxiety was tearing me up from the inside.

That was before I made friends with the girl that lived next door to me and roomed with her for two years in a row. That was before I was adopted by the theater kids even though I wasn’t even a theater major. That was before Shirk, the journalism building, became my second home. That was before I had some of the best years of my life surrounded by a group of friends and classmates who not only live in close quarters like a family, but also treat each other like a family.

Breaking Out of My Shell

As a very introverted individual, I played with the idea of going to a big school like Indiana University. My thought process was this: if I go to a big school the professors won’t see me and I’ll pretty much be invisible to my peers. It sounded like a solid plan for a long time for someone who preferred to just get her homework finished, turned in and not worry about doing something wrong. But then some part of me kicked myself into shape. You have no sense of direction, on a campus as big as IU you would be lost forever. How are you going to get noticed anyway? Going to a bigger school means you’re less likely to be noticed for anything you’re doing for journalism. The internal struggle went on and on. I knew that I had better chances going to Franklin, with one thousand students than I would at any large university. I mean, honestly, FC is so small that I can yell from one end of campus and be heard by a friend on the other.

Everyone Knows

Everyone knows everything. I mean really knows everything. From that bagel you ate this morning for breakfast to who you danced with at that party last Friday. If you’ve talked about it with a friend, at least thirty other students heard it. Sure, it gets frustrating sometimes.

But if Franklin College is anything like a family, you’ve got to take the good with the bad sometimes. Gossip is annoying, but knowing that someone is going through a rough patch or has lost a family member back home can help explain why he or she might be withdrawn or short-tempered. And like a family, we support one another no matter what’s going on.

Cliques Are So High School

I realized cliques don’t matter. In high school, there were the basketball players, the football players, the cheerleaders, the geeks, the band kids, the choir kids, the Goth kids, you name it. It was almost like "Mean Girls." At Franklin we still sit in saga with the same types of people, but if I wanted to go talk to anyone I wouldn’t be scorned forever or made fun of for what some high school students might consider "breaking a social norm." Nobody would laugh as soon as I turned my back to walk away.

I Get to Class on Time

I’m never late to any of my classes. Okay, maybe my alarm doesn’t go off sometimes, but I’m never late because I have to walk five miles to get to an English class. And yeah, I’ll complain about living on one end of campus and having to walk to the other side to get to my classes but I know deep down that I appreciate living on a campus where I can see my dorm room straight ahead, even in the dark.

Safety

Going to a small school involves always being a short distance from access to any building. That was something that was preached at me when I was going through freshman orientation: this campus is safe. And it is. I can go just about anywhere on campus and find an emergency button to push or I can yell and someone on campus will hear me.

One-on-One With Professors

I still hate public speaking. I hate talking in class and I have an anxiety about being wrong in front of a group of my peers. But being able to actually sit down with a professor and go over a paper, or ask them questions about an assignment, or even joke around with them is a wonderful experience. I wouldn’t have gotten that at a larger school. Professors at Franklin College talk about their children and ask about our personal lives. They’re actually curious about their students. They want to get to know them. I’m even friends with a few of my professors on Facebook.

If I had known what I know now as a senior at Franklin College, I would have told my mom that I was right where I needed to be. That she didn’t have to worry about me. I would have told her that her baby girl had found a community that would serve as her second family for the next four years. But I think she knew that when she left me here three years ago.