Okay so I’m a freshmen who is living on campus, but I live about 20 minutes away. It’s been a month now and I’m still miserable and homesick. I cry almost every day and I can’t wait to go home on the weekends. Is this normal? Or should I maybe consider commuting second semester?
Going home every weekend could be adding to your homesickness. Unless you are at a commuter school where everyone disappears over the weekend, that is when friendships are being forged. The best bet is to really immerse yourself in campus life. Get a campus job, join activities or clubs, form or join study groups, find a way to volunteer with fellow students. Set the goal of making yourself too busy to go home or be homesick for now to Thanksgiving. Take a checkpoint then to see how you feel. Also… often freshman dorms suck for non-partiers – it does get better in later years!
No but some kids are like this. My coworker has a kid like this. The minute they left her alone, she cried.
I think you need to give it time. I agree that having Thanksgiving be your check in point a good idea. Try to stay the weekend or as least one night during the weekend. So like stay Friday into Saturday or Saturday into Sunday. Just give it a shot. It will be hard to get yourself immersed if you go home every weekend. Get busy and join a club or something. Go to campus events. Good luck!
Are you at a commuter campus? Does everybody go home on weekends?
If not, give it a chance!
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Make a plan for the weekend which does NOT involve going home. You will never get involved or make friends if you go home every weekend. That’s when things happen. You will never be part of anything nor invited to anything if everyone just figures you won’t be around anyway. You will be “the nice loner w
ho goes home”. It doesn’t mean people don’t like you, they just haven’t gotten to know you and can never rely on you being around. You haven’t given them a chance. -
Get “How to Talk to Anyone” by Leil Lowndes. Great book. Really nice way to learn to break the ice in most any situation if you find it hard to be in a crowd (no matter how small) and always feel you don’t have anything to say.
I read it and thought it was the best thing ever–and I’ve been around for a lot of years!
I just like going home on weekends because I miss home so much. The first night here i cried myself to sleep and woke up with swollen eyes because of how much I cried
The trick is to make college a second home. The way to do that is to make friends and find activities that you like. You can’t stay home forever, and the longer you wait to leave home, the harder it will be. Do you think it will be easier to leave your parents’ house when you are 22 or 24?
It’s ok to go home. But go home less as you get more comfortable with your surrounding at college.
Of course you like home. But you aren’t giving your college a fair try. Make yourself really busy for the next several weeks. Home will still be there. You must have had some self discipline in high school to get to college. Apply that now to working on solving this problem. You know that going home every weekend is a short term fix and not helping you build friendships and activities that are fun on campus.
Moving away from home is a huge transition. Many students posting here about how homesick they are seem to have underestimated just how difficult it can be. You have the choice to go home because you live close by and this may, infact, be interfering with your ability to start to adjust to your new stage in life, true adulthood. If you did not have that choice to go home so easily, you would be forced to deal with it in a different way. There must have been reasons for choosing to live on campus that included the relative ease of getting to classes and getting involved in the myriad of available activities that might help your career in the long run. Do that, get involved, as many responders above have recommended, and start to take those steps toward adjustment. Will you still cry sometimes and feel homesick…yes. That’s okay as long as you function the rest of the time.
Just in case anyone is curious, I lived there for the semester but I am now living at home and I’m so much happier. I don’t think living at school is for everyone
Hope it continues to work out for you.
OP thanks for checking in! I agree with you. College is what you make of it. Not everyone does - or should - follow the same path. Numerically speaking many many kids commute. Guessing here but…You are probably saving a ton of money ? which can be put to better use. Congrats for figuring out your own solution to an unhappy situation. More than living in a dorm, THAT is what makes you grow up, finding your own way on the road to maturity.
I guess study abroad isn’t in the cards…
If you lived 20 minutes from home, I don’t see why you wouldn’t just live there in the first place. I think you made the right decision though.