It's the most wonderful time of the year. Well, it officially begins after you purge on coffee and cram five textbooks into your head during finals week.
Many of us have had a great semester here. We've been successful in classes, had a great year of football and found good company in friends, both new and old. But perhaps some of the most underrated parts of college are the breaks. No, I don't mean a beer at the bar. I mean going home.
And by going home I mean going back to the place where the family you have and the friends you made before college live. It's easy as a student to get caught up in what is essentially a completely different lifestyle. We get comfortable making new friends and being away from parents who were too protective or strict. But when we leave the safe haven of sorority sisters, fraternity brothers and other close friends, we get scared and for once, we are alone.
I squirm when I overhear someone call Penn State home. There's nothing homely about living in a dorm or apartment. There's no Christmas tree in my room, and there are no stockings on the fireplace because, well, there is no fireplace. Unlike my mom, my roommate isn't going to make a pan full of gooey cinnamon rolls to wake me up. There's no car sitting out in the driveway waiting for me to get in, but there is a giant wrecker outside my window with 10 Penn State employees standing around it being paid to take yet another smoke break.
It's unfortunate that many students don't look forward to going home as much as they look forward to coming coming back to school. It seems as though a lot of students come to college being relatively isolated; the movie-like story of the high school student who is lost in life, never went to high school dances, didn't have a lot of friends and managed to get along well in life. But college is an enlightening experience, and the last thing students want to do is return to the hellish domain of parents and a boring hometown.
Home should be a place to embrace the warmth of the family and friends that you grew up with. Some of the best times I've had in the past few years were not at school, but on road trips, at parties or just having casual conversations with friends from home.
Your friends from home have known you longer than your friends from college, and you might even be closer to them. I can't imagine how different my life would be had I decided to "move on" from the friends I grew up with and counted on college friends to be the only part of my social life. Home should be another place to have fun during your college years.
When it comes down to it, there is absolutely no reason to hate the time you spend away from Penn State. Most of us spend eight months each year on campus, leaving four months for us to spend away from school. Over the course of four years, that gives us 16 months away from Penn State. This can either be 16 months of fun or 16 months of boredom.
Instead of complaining about being lonely over breaks, be proactive and get together with old friends. Instead of griping about being around your parents, get out of the house and take a road trip. When done just right, you can have just as much fun during a break as you can living the college life.
If you take nothing else from anything I've said this semester, I hope you find the time to make the most of your college years, especially the times spent away from this campus. Don't fall into the trap thinking you can do without the friendships or relationships you established while you were growing up. You will connect to people from home if you let them, for they understand you the most.
Home, especially around the holidays, is the perfect time to catch up with some of the greatest friends you have, at least until classes start up again in January. Home is all about having fun with friends and family, and the holidays just won't feel real until I get there.
