I visited Amherst College on a Saturday and there were veryyyy few people on campus. Is this how it is at college in general or is that Amherst specific?
I think for those schools whose populations are mostly pulled from the general area (or whose students have the financial resources to travel further), you will get people going home on weekends. Schools with large populations of out of state/country students and/or lower income students will probably be staying put. Also, if there isn’t much to do on campus on the weekends, people will leave.
- Type of college
- Holiday Breaks
- Size of the town or college
- Things to do on the weekends
- Student's situation or choice
These factors make students stay or go home for the weekends. It’s not just your college, it’s nationwide.
- Type of college: You will only see a few people on campus if most of the people commute to college.
- Fall break, spring break, Thanksgiving, and winter break will obviously play a role because most people go home for these breaks.
- If your college is located in a small town, like mine, then some people will go home for the weekend because there's nothing much to do except for partying and if we have a home football game that weekend. If you live in a bigger town, then you'll have more options. I also believe that more people would stay during the weekend if our town was bigger.
Also, college population and town size goes hand in hand IMO.
- Some colleges don't have parties very often while others can have parties every single day of the week. Most people stay or go home depending of the party scene of their college. A poor party scene can turn a weekend at their college into a ghost town. An excellent party scene will give people a reason stay during the weekend. Homecoming, home football games, or other weekend events play role as well.
- Some people go home just because they feel like it. They might feel homesick or they just like to go back home when they have no classes. It's as simple as that.
Overall, there’s nothing wrong going home for the weekend, but IMO, you really shouldn’t be worried about what other people do. Not to be rude, but I made a similar post on here about this and I got the same response. But, I only have one question for you:
Would you go home every weekend, once a month, or only for breaks depending on how far away you live?
On an extra note, maybe that was just a slow weekend and a lot of people decided to go home. Maybe if you got accepted to Amherst, then you might see if this is accurate every weekend.
I think very few people leave Amherst on weekends, actually. Depending when you were there they may have been sleeping or in town or in the dining hall or their dorms or the library or athletic events or otherwise not in view of your tour group?
This might depend upon a lot of factors, including what the weather is and the time of day. If you were there early people might be sleeping in from last night. If the weather was bad they might be partying in their dorms or watching TV or studying in the library. If it was Columbus day weekend and if they had an extra day off some might have gone home for that weekend only.
Certainly when I was in undergrad there was a lot of activity on campus on weekends. In graduate school I was studying in my off campus rental on weekends except out with a girlfriend on Saturday nights. Either one was not right on campus on weekends.
Certainly at the more selective universities, and to some extent at any decent university, by this time in the semester there will be a lot of studying going on even on weekends.
If you were on my campus on a weekend morning, you might think the 46,000 students were all gone. Really though they’re either sleeping or already tailgating.
Not many people leave my son’s Big State U on weekends (except to go to football games)! There is always a lot going on and a lot of people there. It depends on the college and it’s population.
Were you there on October 7? It was fall break, a long weekend. Most likely many people went home or otherwise left campus.
If you search “academic calendar” on a school’s website, you can find out when breaks are.
I was there on the 15th and got to campus at 2 PM. Also, I was not on a tour but was looking around campus by myself, as I had been on a tour over the summer.
The Fall Festival was on the 15th - I guess you missed everyone on the quad by the dining hall?
But, to answer your question, people tend to stay around on weekends.
Yeah, I know very few people who leave on weekends. However, a lot of people may be in the library or their dorms on a Sunday afternoon – we have to get that homework done! FallFest didn’t start until 3:30, if I remember correctly, so you might have missed that. You may also have been in a more isolated part of campus, if you were looking around by yourself instead of with a tour group.
Also, you may have a different idea of “very few people.” Even in the middle of the week, there are going to be fewer people walking around on Amherst’s campus than UMass or a big state school. We only have 1800 students.
Most people stay on campus during the weekends, if not pretty much everyone. Different weather/midterm season/different time of day will also affect how many people you see on campus.
My sense, based on many visits to Amherst, is that there is no one single outdoor gathering place (like, Chapin Beach at Williams or Foss Hill at Wesleyan) where students can stop and chill on the weekends. The freshman quad is too shady for sunbathing in New England and none of the other grassy areas are as large. The situation may be remedied by the new Greenway landscaping/construction project on the college’s east and southern perimeters.
^I agree with Glittervine’s second paragraph. The top small liberal arts colleges, like Amherst, have a lot of acreage relative to number of students. I have not seen one that looks crowded. You might pass a lecture hall right when a bunch of classes are letting out, or visit the dining hall at noon, or a homecoming game, and see a lot of students. Otherwise, you might not bump into a crowd!