Welcome back, Hope College!
I hope you all had a wonderful break and are ready to start a new semester fresh!
If you’re like me, it was bittersweet coming back to school. You’ve just spent all of your much-deserved vacation bonding with your family over Christmas dinner and mingling with your high school friends while ringing in the New Year. In other words, it’s hard to go! To leave all of those comfortable people and come back to…what? What, or who, are we coming back to?
In my eyes, when I left the comfort of my family at home, I was coming back to not only my friends, but my family here at Hope. Because if you really think about it, you see the people in your residence hall, your classes, and even the cafeteria more months out of the year than you see your biological family, and that says a lot. You might be leaving your family back at home, but you’re rejoining your family when coming back to Hope.
I didn’t see it like that freshman year, but that’s only because I hadn’t grown close to the people around me. As the year wore on, I grew closer to my roommate, my cluster mates (I lived in Dykstra) and even the constant flow of people I saw en route to my morning classes. They slowly but surely became my little family – my home away from home, as they say. I came to miss them when I went home during the year. As last year melted into this year, breaks like the one we just had have turned into nice rejuvenation periods to reconnect with loved ones, but coming back to Hope I know that I truly have missed the friends I now call family.
I’m sure that as my upcoming years at Hope pass, I’ll grow even closer to this family. I will be sad to see them go, come graduation, but as my college years turn into adult years, I’ll be able to look back and reminisce on the family that got me though some of the best years of my life.
Start this semester off great, everyone, and appreciate the people around you as you start classes. Until next time, readers!