_Kurtis Dunlap is a fifth-year senior at MU. He is an English major. He writes about student life as an opinion columnist for The Maneater._
It’s 2 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon, tailgates are in full force, school pride is amplified throughout campus, and someone is already passed out with a beer in their hand. Travel across the country and this is what a typical Saturday on a college campus looks like during the fall, but for some, it is much different. Some students decide to go home and see the same people and places they grew up experiencing every day during high school.
I am sure mom and dad appreciate you coming home to visit and love seeing your face, but going home multiple times during a semester is just hurting your ability to grow and experience new things. Yes, you get free home-cooked meals and someone to do your laundry, but you also miss out on all the awesome things that college allows you to do.
Your freshman year is arguably the most important of your college years in terms of personal growth. Clinical psychologist Michael Thompson wrote in his book “Homesick and Happy: How Time Away From Parents Can Help a Child Grow,” “If a child keeps coming home, he’s preventing himself from making the kinds of connections that will support his life in college.”
“Independence requires you to put yourself out there and take risks and go out to dinner with new people and go sit in another person’s room,” Thompson wrote. College is the time where you establish new friendships and test boundaries. How can you make these connections with new people if you are never around?
You stunt your own growth because you revert back to the familiar. People feel most comfortable around family, and during freshman year it is easy to want to escape the unknown and intimidating for the comfort of home.
When you go home, you miss out on all those late-night conversations with friends that create deep bonds. I’m sure your mom would love to hear about the problems you’re having with roommates or your struggles to handle the workload in college, but if you always run home to your parents, you’re not growing into the adult you could be.
You chose to come to MU for a reason. Maybe your parents came here and it is a family tradition or you fell in love with the campus. Whatever your reason is, you owe it to yourself to stay and experience all it has to offer. Trust me, your four years, or five in some cases, are going to go by faster than you think. Go to football games, even if we aren’t any good. Join a club or society or go to concerts or speakers on campus. MU offers a countless number of ways to get involved that will help you get everything out of the university that you possibly can while you are here.
Some people come to college and expect everything to just fit into place. It doesn’t work like that. College is a struggle, and you can’t be afraid to fail. When you fail, you learn more about yourself than you would if life was easy. I would argue that I am mostly the person I am today because of the failures in my life. You can’t be afraid of failure because you won’t ever grow, and if you continue to go home every weekend and do the same thing you’ve always done, you’ll get the same thing you’ve always got.
