Up until senior year of high school, if someone had told me I’d eventually be going to college only a mile away from home, I wouldn’t have believed them. I’d driven past the large marbled gates of Rollins College too many times to count. I’d even gone to summer camp at the school when I was 11, playing outdoor games on the main lawn and taking culinary and forensics classes in the academic buildings. Having grown up in the area, the school was just part of my surroundings, in the background of years worth of memories. It was not somewhere I wanted to seriously consider applying. Since the high school I attended is five minutes down the road from campus, I was worried it wouldn’t feel like I’d made the transition into a new stage of life.
During my senior year of high school, in the climax of my college-related stress, my parents convinced me to take a tour of the school. Though I was resistant, they assured me it was worth a try. They were right — taking the tour made me see the school through a different lens, and I realized how little I actually knew about Rollins as a college. As I walked through parts of the school I’d never been to and heard from actual students, I found it easy to envision myself going to classes and eating at the Campus Center. To my initial surprise, Rollins had a lot of qualities I was looking for in a school: small class sizes, a strong English department and liberal arts focus, a good study abroad program and a beautiful campus. After the tour, I decided to apply, and eventually, enroll.
One thing I always explain to my friends that went to out-of-state schools is that going to a local college feels nothing like high school. To me, my life at Rollins and the friends I have there are completely separate from my pre-college world. Since I live in the dorms and don’t have a car on campus, I don’t come home very often, and my life at school feels as isolated as the lives of any other college student away from home. Just as my perspective of Rollins changed when I became a student, I now see my hometown in a slightly new light: the places I frequent in college are completely different from my favorite hangout spots with my high school friends.
If you are currently looking for college options, I wouldn't rule out the school(s) nearest you. Taking a tour or going to an information session may completely change the way you think about your local college or university. Visiting a school as a member of the community is very different from visiting as a prospective student. Even if it turns out to not be the best choice for you, do not rule out a school based on its proximity to your home or what you think you know about it. Attending classes and meeting other college students will give the school a different vibe, and odds are, there’s a lot of information you don’t and can’t know by just living nearby. And, to be honest, being a five-minute car ride away from home can be comforting when you’re sick of sharing a laundry machine or want some maternal care to heal a cold.
