<p>My son just got accepted at Stony Brook. He wants to major in comp sci & has a few other acceptances, too.</p>
<p>He definitely wants a social life in college on the weekends, though, and I've just heard so many reports that Stony Brook is a 'suitcase college' -- many kids go home on weekends.</p>
<p>Not sure if anyone could verify or refute this perception?</p>
<p>Thanks for any thoughts!</p>
<p>According to a lot of the other threads, yes people do go home and it is supposedly a ghost town on weekends.</p>
<p>What are your son's stats by the way?</p>
<p>A lot of people do go home, but it's not bad when you have friends that stay... So make friends with out-of-state kids haha not NJ because it seems like a lot of the ones from NJ I know go home a lot:P</p>
<p>My friend will be coming home because she has nowhere to go and has to come back. It's not very lively down there she heard.</p>
<p>Surveys done by the school show a significant number of people staying on campus for the weekends. Our friendly neighborhood admissions officer Chris can probably dig up numbers faster than I can, but I will say that reports of an increasing number of people staying on campus on weekends are consistent with my experiences. And those statistics don't even account for people like me and several of my neighbors, who technically "commute" but are more accurately described as living in off-campus apartments near the university, and are very involved in campus life.</p>
<p>I've never had a problem finding things to do on weekends, and I've never had issues with my friends leaving. Yes, our big campus feels emptier without all of the commuter students, professors, and weekday employees around, and yes some people who live nearby go home, but that still leaves thousands of students on campus--more than you'll find at many colleges any day of the week. There are plenty of things to do (parties, concerts, plays, lectures, conferences, impromptu games of freeze tag, whatever) and plenty of people to do them with. I only have one friend who frequently goes home on weekends, and that's because she's trying to help out her sick father. My parents live an hour away from Stony Brook, close enough for me to have commuted for a year, and I've typically seen them twice a semester, if that. They joke that maybe if they'd sent me farther away, they'd see me more :)</p>
<p>You do have to go out and find the things that interest you, and find the people you want to spend time with. But in my experience, people who go looking for interesting things will find them, easily.</p>