<p>I live in Boston and I’m going to school in South Carolina. It’s been a great cultural experience. I respect Southerners a lot more now and have learnt to love sweet tea and fried chicken (even though I’m sure it’s gonna give me diabetes).</p>
<p>I bought most of my stuff down at Clemson and put it into storage for the summer.</p>
<p>Moving away from your parents will give you a real shot at independence. A lot of people at my school go home on the weekends to their parents but I can’t since I live nowhere near Boston. I’ve definitely been forced to be an independent person. You get homesick sometime but believe me, once college gets underway and everything that’s going on along with it, you’ll be homesick less often than you think.</p>
<p>I live in WA and go to school in AL, which is slightly over 2000 miles away. I agree with the other posters that college is one of the few times in life that you will have an opportunity to live in another part of the country or even in a different country. Living far away from home helps build a strong sense of independence and allows one to discover more easily who they truly are. I would definitely say that deciding to go to a school far away from home has been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.</p>
<p>As for flying vs. driving to school, I’d recommend flying and buying things when you get there, though you can also mail/ship items beforehand. Flying is quicker and probably cheaper than driving when you consider the gas, food, lodging, and car maintenance costs that come from a cross country trip. Items that you’d need for your dorm are similarly priced throughout the continental US and by driving across the country in the shortest amount of time doesn’t leave you much time for sightseeing, which is one of the benefits of road trips. Plus, flying that far adds lots of miles to your account that you can use for a future trip.</p>
<p>While I don’t normally drink tea, sweet tea tastes better than some other types of tea. It’s an acquired taste. I’m really starting to like southern BBQ, grits, greens, and fried okra.</p>
<p>I would say that at a certain point (say 500 miles), there is really only a small difference between 500 miles and 2000 miles. The point is that you are far enough away from home and it forces you to really throw yourself into your college experience–this is a wonderful thing.</p>
<p>I go to school out-of-state in a large city. One of my closest friends lives about 45 minutes away from campus (she lives on-campus though). I think being so close to home really held her back in terms of the “college experience” because anytime she had a problem, she would just go home, instead of staying to deal with it. Also, that homesickness you get from having just left home–she would get that every time she visited home, instead of just three or four times during the year.</p>
<p>Living far away is a great chance for you to remove yourself from everything you only did because you had to, or because it was what your family/community expected of you. At your new school no one will know who you were before, so it’s completely up to you which values you want to embody!</p>