<p>I am beginning to second guess my decision to go to boarding school. I really want to go but am afraid I will miss home and my friends.</p>
<p>For those of you already in boarding school how did you adjust? How long did it take?</p>
<p>For those of you getting ready go in August are you worried?</p>
<p>I don't want my parents to send in my deposit and then I decide not to go.</p>
<p>Yeah I’m kinda worried. Just chiiiiiiiiiiill. You really should go I can’t stand the thought of someone wasting such an opporotunity on a whim. From what I can gather from people that already attend BS, it takes some time to get used to, but you DO get used to it (and you really come to appreciate your family). Very few people just can’t deal with it, and you can always quit it mid-year.</p>
<p>Don’t second guess - this happens to almost everyone. Just go and you’re basically guaranteed to love it. You’ll settle in and realize that everyone else was/is in the same position as you, and things will take off from there. It’ll be a great experience and you’ll grow tremendously from it.</p>
<p>Which school are you considering going (or not going, as the case may be) to?</p>
<p>yea, i’m really nervous too.
the one tiime i’ve been away from home (minus sleepovers and school overnight trips) was an overnight girl scouts camp in 4th grade which i hated.
but going to a bs is such a great opportunity, so i’m going to just suck it up.
anyways, the kids that i met at bs all said they got over their homesickness.</p>
<p>I can’t tell you whether you should go away or not. It is not for everyone. But I will say that you do adjust faster than you might expect. At our S’s school, they ask parents not to visit until the long fall weekend to make everyone less homesick and the adjustment easier. Now when we visit, he wants to return to school and stay in his room after we have had dinner (as opposed to staying in the hotel with us), and he is already asking about programs where he may be away from home for a number of weeks this summer. Boarding school will keep you much busier than you probably are now, so you won’t have as much time to think about it. I won’t say that it is easy-it’s not, epecially if you are a close family. However, you will get over it, will make new friends who will stay with you for life (unlike your hometown friends in most cases) and probably be really glad you went away.</p>
<p>Fear about going away to School is felt on some level by virtually every new boarding school student. One of the all-time great benefits of the BS experience is the improvement of your personality as you confront and overcome these fears. Your self-confidence shoots up, your self-awareness sharpens, you become a much more capable human being, more comfortable in your own skin. You will be amazed at the difference between day school and BS students when college rolls around. The BS students will be the ones who set their rooms up in 5 minutes, make 10 new friends the first day, join groups quickly and easily, pursue new skills and interests without fear of failure, interact effectively with teachers, and, overall, demonstrate a level resourcefulness typical of someone much older and more experienced.</p>
<p>So remember, most everyone feels like you!! Don’t worry if takes a semester or two to really get in the groove. Many would argue that BS students don’t really come into their own until sophomore year. Be relentlessly kind and keep a smile on your face. These are time-tested ingredients for success. You WILL be so happy. Promise.</p>
<p>Parlabane that post was beautiful. I am going to have my son read this thread since he is feeling similar to you OP! Hang in there!</p>
<p>My daughter absolutely wanted to go to boarding school and we all knew she needed the huge academic and extracurricular opportunities it offered her. The day we took her there her first year, though, she was incredibly nervous and totally doubting that she had made the right choice to go. Her father and I were not even home yet (we lived a day and a half’s drive away) before she called to say that she absolutely loved it and couldn’t imagine NOT having made the choice to go. She had eight other new girls on her hall (she went as a sophomore) so plenty of company in the early days, and the school did a fabulous job helping everyone to orient. It was the best decision she and we have ever made; completely wonderful and life changing.</p>
<p>I’m scared too but, at boarding school there will be people to support you and your not alone. Most of the people there are away from their families and friends and home.</p>
<p>Parlabane,
I’m printing this out to give to my soon-to-board son. Thanks for the great post!</p>
<p>Parlabane, it couldn’t have been said better than that. </p>
<p>I’m nervous too! And it’s so weird that through the whole application process, I’ve been looking at boarding school like some kind of heaven on earth.
Now that I’m accepted, I’m definitely not giving up this opportunity, but I can feel a little remorseful… And hey this is what CC is for. We go through these things together. :D</p>
<p>Amazing post, Parlabane.
Dapple, I felt the same thing while doing the applications. xD And indeed we go through this together. :D</p>
<p>I have to agree with the majority of you, I’m scared out of my mind. I went from the choice to apply to the application deadline in three weeks, the moment I was done applying the fear of leaving my home to go to a school 3,000 miles away started to drive me crazy. I’ve tried to maintain control by keeping everything on a strictly logical level. However, sometimes when my emotions start to get the better of me I secretly telling myself I can always come home, return to my old school, and have my life return to the way it is now.</p>
<p>don’t worry! once you get there, orientation will be super busy and you won’t think about home. you’ll be making friends and won’t think about home. you’ll be having all these new classes and making more friends and won’t be thinking about home. by the time you have a moment where you CAN think about home, you’ll be so used to bs you won’t even be a bit homesick. that’s exactly how it went for me, at least.</p>
<p>First of all I’d like to say that boarding school isn’t for everyone. Though the school is there every step of the way in nurturing you, it is very easy for a student to fall behind with bad time management,study habits, etc. Also, it is perfectly understandable for a freshman, who can be 14, to be homesick, and for some kids, I do believe in late bloomers in that they might be perfectly fine in the living away from home environment years later.</p>
<p>Any fear of living months away from home is understandable. That said, I completely Parlabane, in that statistically most kids who drop out of college freshman year is due to the fact that they can’t live away from home. Boarding schools provide the perfect bridge to college not only in terms of academics, but also in terms of growth as an individual. </p>
<p>I personally go to Lawrenceville and the way the school is structured is that there are a lot of restrictions applied to freshmen, and more and more privileges and freedom is given to the kid as he grows, so that senior year is very similar to college, but the kids have learned how to manage everything by themselves.</p>
<p>Also I’m sure all the boarding schools have things in placed to ease the transition. Personally at Lawrenceville there’s a ton of freshmen orientation on top of freshman dining room, freshmen hangout quad, and all the freshmen of the same sex live in one house; all these things quickly allow the freshmen to make friends and such.</p>
<p>My D is going into her third year at BS next year. I vividly remember the day we dropped her off. All along she was very excited to go to school and we (M & D) were not concerned about her making the adjustment at all. Still, she was sooo nervous the day we took her. She felt out of her element because it was nothing like she had ever experienced before. She was crying and we had no idea what to do to make her feel better. She survived that day and two years later she is the self confident, independent person that Parlabane describes above. </p>
<p>Everyone will feel nervous as the start of school nears and some will question if they have made the right choice. The only advice I can give is to stick with your decision it is probably the right thing to do and you will never know if you bail before you go. BS is not right for everyone, but it does work out for the vast majority of students that attend. </p>
<p>Best of luck to you all.</p>
<p>Morris–if I may ask, did you d ever attend sleep away camp before going to bs?</p>
<p>Four summers ago my d had a chance to go 2 hours away to a week-long camp. Her exact words to me “I don’t want to build any dang bridges”, ( it was a engineering camp). I made her go, thou granpa said he would come after her after midnight if she really wanted to come home–she didnt–she was fine and they built boats that summer not bridges.</p>
<p>The next year she decided she wanted to go to NY for 3 week camp (we are from Illinois) and then go to the week-long camp after that. She cant be stopped now. I believe that bs is going be just wonderful for her even at the beginning. </p>
<p>Again this summer, I made the bed, un-packed some stuff and she was really ready for me to leave and get on with her camp. (It is now Friday and she hasnt called or e-mailed yet–I miss her but I know she is fine.)</p>
<p>I think that some kids will have a more difficult time than other, but I truly believe that summer camp over the last 4 years has made me and my d see that she is right for bs.</p>
<p>PS-I am going to send a care-package in the morning–just goodies and 2 pictures she left behind.</p>
<p>Yes she had been away. </p>
<p>When she originally asked about going away to BS we sent her to summer camp at the school she ultimately decided to attend. She did very well there loving every minute of it. When we dropped her off she was familiar wtih the campus and even living in the dorms. Still, going to camp is not the same as going off to school for the first time. </p>
<p>It hit her that while home is still home she was going to live away from us more than with us from that point forward. </p>
<p>From the sound of it your D will do wonderfully.</p>
<p>Morris–thanks for the insight. I know that all growth contains moments of pain, so I know their will be tears and tough days but I am hoping for my outcome with my d to be the same as you have experienced, a self confident and independent young woman.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That thought struck me when I woke my son up for school over a month ago. He woke to find me just standing by the bed. (creepy, I know 
) I told him what I was thinking and he agreed that it was strange. At least he’s prepared for that and it won’t dawn on him when we drop him off.</p>
<p>His goal this summer seems to be to spend every waking moment with his friends. I had to remind him that he won’t see us either. He said, “Yeah, but I don’t have to worry about you guys forgetting about me.” So, I’m trying to prepare for him being ill-at-ease as he transitions. I think he’s going to miss his sister more than he realizes and make new friends quicker than he thinks too.</p>