Students on break face an in-between world.
By Lynn Pasquerella (president, Mount Holyoke College)
SOUTH HADLEY—This time of year, I make a point of looking out my office window. Here at Mount Holyoke College, I have a good view of the local bus stop. At the end of the semester, I like to spend a few moments watching students board buses as they head home for winter break.
I see a couple of things.
They always have so much gear: enormous suitcases, heavy backpacks, water bottles, coats and scarves, hockey sticks, books, headphones, bags of Doritos.
It’s as though they’re preparing for a yearlong transcontinental expedition. Everything they own seems to be stuffed into packs that they sling over their backs and scoot along snow-covered sidewalks with their boots.
Then there’s the other thing: the goodbyes. College students can be dramatic with the end-of-semester farewells. They laugh and hug each other with such intensity, such finality—you’d never guess that they met for the first time just four months ago.
I must admit, those fierce goodbyes remind me of my own first years in college when everything around me seemed to be changing—myself most of all.
College is a time of transformation for most students: from dependence on family to those first, sometimes wobbly steps toward autonomy.
Right now, especially for students returning home after their first semester, the ground is shifting. They live in an in-between world.
The homes they left for Mount Holyoke or Brown or Grinnell no longer feel like home. That dorm room back on campus and those newly made friends huddled at the bus stop seem more familiar. The students I talk to confess that they sometimes worry that they will no longer fit in back where they came from.
They are concerned that their new interests will seem strange to their old friends. They wonder if they’ll drift away from their families by becoming the person they hope to be. They fear the family dog won’t recognize them.
We all know that with change comes anxiety. I want to tell students that every step toward realizing who they are involves risks, sometimes even a leap of faith. We all must meet change with optimism and confidence, and be prepared to explore, adapt, and push beyond what is familiar. Change can be frightening, but it also can be exhilarating.
That’s when I catch myself sounding—well—too professorial, maybe too comfortable standing on my own soap box.
I turn again to the window and see the bus stop crowd rushing about, gathering up their belongings.
The bus driver shifts into gear. Students laugh and hug, linger a bit, then hoist everything they have onto that first step.