Going away to college can be the best years of your life, but that doesn’t mean that you will never miss home. To me, home has always been a safe place where I have felt love, happiness, and stability. Like the saying goes, “Home is where the heart is." For me, and a lot of other students, leaving home is filled with a roller-coaster of emotions throughout your freshman year. Here are some steps to help you get through these hard times of missing home.
1. Find people who can relate to your feelings
- Finding someone with a common problem can help you have someone to cope with. It will allow you to not have to go through such a hard experience on your own. This person will listen to you, and you can listen to them. Both of you will be able to express how you feel and help each other find a solution.
2. Get involved in activities
- Getting involved in activities will allow you to spend your time doing something you like instead of always thinking about missing home. It will fill your time with people and activities that make you feel a part of something. You can join a writing club, intramural sports, or a club in your major. Joining a club will also allow you to fill your time maybe helping out the community and feeling a sense of involvement.
3. Setup Skype/FaceTime dates
- If you miss your parents, you can just video chat them! This will allow you to stay connected to your parents and be able to really feel like they are with you. This will also allow you to see your pets and let them see you!! It's a way to feel like you're visiting home, without actually being there.
4. Have fun with friends on the weekends
- You can go bowling, shopping, play card games, watch movies, or do anything else that involves hanging out with friends. This will allow you to not over think on the weekends and being with people that you have fun with will create a distraction. This could also solve your problem of missing home, because now you feel a sense of enjoyment from being with the people from school.
5. Take advantage of school time off
- When break comes for your college, be aware of how long and when so you can contact you friends and family from home and arrange times to hang out with them and reconnect. This will make you feel like you're still involved in your friends' life, even if you may not be in town anymore.
6. Do stuff that you would do at home
- If you really miss home, do things that remind you of it. Maybe if there is a certain thing you would do regularly at home,or just something you do only at home, you can do it while at school to get that reminder. For example, at home we would go to a certain pizza place when they had the “Family Special.” Since I can’t go with my family to get pizza and that specific place, my roommate and I found a pizza place that we both love and we will go there and share a pizza. It reminds me of home, and although it isn't the same pizza place, my roommate and I have created our own tradition.
Leaving home to go to school can be tough. As long as you can find a way to make yourself comfortable and surround yourself with people who understand what you're going through, the adjustment from living at home to living at school will be simple!
