Packing up your dorm, especially as a freshman, causes you to feel a whirlwind of emotions. It's a lengthy process that needs to be accomplished in stages. They include (but are not limited to):
Stage 1: Denial
So, you start getting emails from residence life about how and when to move out, but you haven’t even had your first final yet. You’re not even thinking about move out day, you’re not even going to open the email. The end is not near.
Stage 2: Procrastination
Most of your friends have at least started to pack up their things and even though you see it, you still refuse to believe it. You come up with every excuse on why to not start packing. I mean, you have a few more days… and besides you’re so busy studying, and it just wouldn’t be right to start packing yet.
Stage 3: Reminiscing
Cue the tears, you started packing a little bit and with every picture you take off your wall another tear is shed. You think back to move in day, and soon enough you and your roommate are walking down memory lane, alternating between cracking up and holding back tears.
Stage 4: Depression
You can’t help but to think where the time went and how your freshman year over already! By this point your room is pretty much packed and you realize you will never be living in this room again. Although you’re not going to miss living right across the hall from the boy’s bathroom, you are going to miss your room and all of the memories that were created there. Wait, why can't I live here forever?
Stage 5: Excitement
After you’ve exhausted yourself from crying you start to think about going home- sleeping in your own bed, driving your car, playing with your puppy, oh and seeing your family and friends! (Just kidding, I can’t wait to see everyone). It is going to be an adjustment going home for the summer, but I am looking forward to it, I love Ursinus, but there’s no place like home.
Stage 6: Acceptance
Sooner or later you have to leave, no matter how much you’ve avoided it. It's bittersweet; on the one hand you made it through your first year of school, but on the other, you will come back in the fall as a sophomore in a new building (in my case, a house on Main Street), and although your first year dorm will always have a special place in your heart, you know that new memories await when you return in late August.
I will most definitely miss my small, but comfy room in Stauffer two. And to the incoming freshmen that are fortunate enough to have it next semester, I hope it is as good to you as it was to me and Julia.
