If you’ve lived in one place your entire life and then gone somewhere else for college, you might be feeling this way too. Right now, I’m in the dead middle of the summer after my freshman year of college, and I’m experiencing something that I was not prepared for. Campus sickness. Everyone has been warned about homesickness and how bad it will be during freshman year (although it's usually worse than anyone thinks it will be before they go), but nobody is warned about how much they’ll miss their college friends during the summer.
I currently live with my parents in Stow, Ohio, which is only about two hours away from Ohio Wesleyan University, where I go to school. A majority of my friends have similar breaks as me, so, whenever I’m home on a break, most of my friends from home will all be in the same town at the same time I am. A ton of my friends from home even go to Kent State, which is a ten-minute drive from my house, so I’d get to see most of them if I came home on any random weekend throughout the school year. Not bad for long distance friendship.
With college friends, however, trying to get together is a lot harder, because almost none of my friends are local to the area around my school, and we all live in different directions. One of my closest friends lives a little over two hours west of me, while another lives about three and a half hours southwest from me, and my roommate for next year lives in New Jersey. On top of that, over the past year I’ve become friends many other students from different states (such as Pennsylvania, Virginia, California and New York) and even different countries (one of my sorority sisters is from Puerto Rico!). So, basically, even if your summer work schedules work out so that you get to see one or two of your college friends, there will be so many more that you’ll be missing until the fall.
You’ve spent an entire year building a community for yourself at a college where you originally didn’t know anybody. These people have become your family, as corny as that sounds, seeing you at your absolute best (doing something you’re passionate about, like performing onstage or in sports) and your absolute worst (FINALS WEEK). If you live on a small campus, like me, you’ve spent the school year walking down a hallway, or up a flight of stairs, or across the street to another dorm building whenever you wanted to tell your friends the latest news. You’ve eaten lunch with them every day. You were in the library with them a few days a week. They passed you a couple of times each day on campus. Now they’re hours away from you, in a different place, a seemingly different world.
Before I left for college I never would have thought of it this way, but now I’ve realized that once you go away to college you’ll always be missing someplace. When you’re at school, you miss home. When you’re at home, you miss school. You literally can’t win either way.
The best tactic I’ve found to cope with both homesickness and campus sickness is trying to appreciate the place I’m in instead of thinking about the place I’m not. Making new memories instead of dwelling on ones that have already happened. Being busy with activities like hanging out with friends and family who are nearby, or working hard at whatever I’m up to at the time, keeps me from constantly sitting around and wishing I was elsewhere. When I do have too much time to myself, I try to put it into perspective: my friends from school are only one phone call, one Facetime and five weeks away. Who wants to worry about studying, anyway?
