Now that we've all been home for about a month, homesickness for school has set in for a lot of us. It's a weird concept to think about. When you typically think of being homesick, you think about missing your family and the home you moved out of to go to college, not the other way around. But these particular circumstances have left us in a place where we are missing our schools a lot more than we normally would.

Being forced to move back home meant we lost a lot of things. We lost the structure of being on campus to complete our classes, which a lot of us need in order to thrive in our classes. A lot of students take online classes throughout the semester with the idea that being on campus would motivate them to do their work. This has been taken away, and tons of students don't know how to manage online classes without a classroom structure.

Not only that, we lost a major sense of freedom. We are used to living on our own at this point, and living by our own rules and standards. We aren't used to being back at home and having our family members around anymore. Usually, we get alone time without interruptions, and now interruptions are common from our family members because they don't realize how much alone time we are used to having at school.

We're also really missing our friends and roommates. Most of us have built really strong relationships with the people we live with in our rooms or halls, and even the people we take classes with. A lot of these friendships are built with people that aren't from our hometowns, so it's a lot harder to get together with them when we leave campus and go home. We miss our favorite spots on campus and the local food that we can't get when we go home. The community we've grown into and love dearly is empty now, and we would do anything to go eat at the student center with our friends or sit out on the lawn in the middle of campus.

Mostly, just go easy on us. It's a hard transition for students and their families right now, and we all are having to learn how it works on our own. Don't give us a hard time for missing school, I promise we miss you the same when we leave home.