<p>My first day of college in 1980 was kind of an anti-climax, since I was a commuter. I drove off to school in my '74 Mustang as usual, but parked in a different lot and went to different buildings. In short, it was like 13th grade.
Fast forward to spring semester 1982 - I was now a sorority member and moved into the house. Packed my own car and drove there - all four miles! Bought a Kliban Cat (remember those?) comforter set and a laundry basket, but not much else. I realize now it was hard on my mom, though. I worked part-time at Kroger and she came in one day when I was working and asked if I were coming home after work … I thought she was going to burst into tears!</p>
<p>Hi. im in a simular situation. I started at my university and have been here for 10 days. Its not that i dont make friends or hate my roommate, but a part of me hates it here. I really want to transfer to be closer to home, and my parents tell me to give it a chance here, but that if i really want to i can transfer. I don’t know what to do. I would love to hear from people who transferred college to be closer to home possibly during there first semester, or advice from anyone.</p>
<p>[Vintage</a> LuggageLight Blue Suitcase by simplysuzula on Etsy](<a href=“This item is unavailable - Etsy”>This item is unavailable - Etsy)</p>
<p>[Upcycled</a> Vintage Red Samsonite Suitcase with Map of by BrightWall](<a href=“Upcycled Vintage Red Samsonite Suitcase With Map of California - Etsy”>Upcycled Vintage Red Samsonite Suitcase With Map of California - Etsy)</p>
<p>Look familiar, ladies? I had the light blue, myself…1968. :)</p>
<p>1981- my mother and godmother took me to Union Station, DC to take the train to Chicago. My mom splurged and got me a sleeper berth. Mostly the local kids had parents there. I was impressed with one girl who came from SF area with both parents. I don’t remember any special activities for parents. Oh, and yes, I brought a typewriter. Only one kid in my house had a computer.</p>
<p>The following year, my future h also made a similar journey by train except he left from NJ.</p>
<p>For our son, h traveled with him back to the US and helped him get set up.</p>
<p>It was 1990 and I was 16 and following my BF (stupid!) to his small LAC. My Mom (only child, single parent) drove me with the small amount of stuff I owned, we unpacked, found the local bank, had to get special permission to get a checking account for a 16 year old, and she said goodbye and left and I think I said goodbye to BF’s parents too when they left. I just remember this awesome feeling of finally being on my own. I think my BF had a small fridge so I just stored stuff in his a dorm away but I bought my first TV in January for the superbowl 
Didn’t come often except breaks and often just by train. Did have the milk crates and cinder blocks too!</p>
<p>I did transfer however sophomore year when I came home to have the D I just launched this past weekend at her first year of college - where we took 2 cars, DH, siblings, a big mini fridge with freezer, microwave, and all the piles of stuff one accumulates these days! We didn’t attend any of the parent events that day - too hot, too tired, but we helped her unpack everything, ran some errands for other stuff, all gave her hugs and said goodbye (younger sister did provide complete waterworks). Given the minimal but very positive texts I’ve received from D - I think she too had that same magical realization that she was on her own.</p>
<p>My Mom did come by the night before we launched D and shared a letter I had sent from college - it was very strange to relive things through the letter (that I don’t recall writing) because I have changed so much from who I was then but it’s all neat too to see how things have changed.</p>
<p>patsmom,</p>
<p>the link to the red Sampsonite shows my parents luggage—the stuff that I was determined not to get in '76.</p>
<p>my light blue soft-sided AT set was so cool (at the time). And oddly enough they changed the color ever so slightly in the next year or two. The new color wasn’t “cool”.</p>
<p>Stayed at my girlfriends house until her parents kicked me out at about 1:00 am … started to pack with a planned 7:00 am departure. By 2:30 or so … the duffle bag and trunk (from my Dad’s army days) and my (brown) samsonite suitcase were packed an ready to roll … and at 7:00 my parents and I were off. This was the late 70s so things got tougher when I got the stereo (the bigger the speakers the better!). Personlly, I get a kick out of the CC threads starting a month before departure discussing all the prep work needed to send a kid off to school.</p>
<p>Late 70s blue hardsided suitcase (may still be in the basement; I stored my wedding gown in it for decades) and trunk that we used for packing clothes when we moved to Germany in 1970. Boxes of books, stereo, boards/bricks for bookshelf, sewing machine (my graduation gift), manual typewriter from thrift store. Took pretty much everything I owned, as I believed (and rightly so) that anything I left behind would be claimed/tossed. Took a quilt my grandmother made in the 1930s and sheets from my bed at home. Did not have $$ to buy Twin XL.</p>
<p>Mom drove me to Athens in a Mazda GLC (tiny car), helped me move in, handed me $50, said “you’re on your own” and drove home. I had a one-time $1500 external scholarship sitting at the Bursar’s office and I had to go there the next day to beg them to distribute it over two quarters instead of three, because that was all the money I had. If they had not done so, I would have had to go home because I did not have $$ to pay for tuition/R&B/books. Also got a job at the dining hall the same day.</p>
<p>My parents would not complete the FAFSA, and the school did not require that fees be paid prior to arrival. By mid-winter quarter I had no money for spring and my mom finally relented and did the FAFSA forms. Zero EFC, but I got full Pell, which I used for Spring quarter and summer school expenses. Between Pell and working 20 hrs a week, I scraped by.</p>
<p>I immediately started the process of going independent, and by junior year I was able to get FA based on my own income. (Pell grant and small loan, not any more than I got frm my parents’ EFC, but at least I didn’t have to worry about whether my parents would complete the forms.) In retrospect, I am sure it hurt my parents terribly that I would not come home over the summers (going independent meant at the time that one didn’t live with parents more than 6 wks/yr.), but I was also very angry. They never shared their financial situation, but had assured me they would pay for the flagship. Did not know the true story until the day I got on campus.</p>
<p>From day one at college, the goal was to survive financially rather than succeed academically. Not how I envisioned it would happen at all.</p>
<p>Wow, this thread brings back memories as I am about to fly across country to take S2 to his first year of college tomorrow. My parents drove me 7 hours with my electric typewriter (graduation gift) and my 8 track stereo. Boy, did I bet on the wrong technology! It was 1974 and only the premeds had calculators, the rest of us had slide-rules. Now, my son is busy packing his graphing calculator, laptop and videogames and, of course, we have a date at the Bed, Bath and Beyond in Providence. I feel old.</p>
<p>It was the fall of 1967. I had never been to the college, had only seen pictures in the catalog and brochures. But, off my mother and I went in what now seems to be a most horrendous trip! Because we had no car, we were dependent on public transportation. We took a taxi from home to the train station, a local train into Philadelphia where we boarded a train to Baltimore. In Baltimore we took another taxi from the train station to the Greyhound bus station and then took a bus to my college town in western Maryland. When we arrived at the bus station there, we took yet another taxi to my dorm. Obviously, we took very little with us - the infamous Samsonite hard sided luggage and a portable typewriter. A few weeks later a cousin drove down with the things we couldn’t carry, but ended up having some of the boxes fall off the roof rack of the car never to be seen again by me!</p>
<p>I also took an eight track tape player and a popcorn popper, the old fashioned kind with a metal pot and glass lid that sat on a heated coil. We lived on popcorn until someone knocked it off it’s perch on the dorm room window sill and it plunged six floors down to the sidewalk. </p>
<p>At the end of freshman year, I jammed all my stuff into the back of the Pinto and headed home. Nobody ever helped me with moves in and out of dorms after the initial fall move in. I was on my own. We have done the same with our two sons. </p>
<p>My neighbor and her husband and the dog all left Sunday with their D to help with her move-in. Her college is 1.5 hours away. The D is a 21 yr. old college senior! The Mom was surprised that her D didn’t want her to hang her clothes in the closet for her. I guess cutting the cord is tough.</p>
<p>I was completely on my own too. Flew by myself from Australia with a trunk of stuff, my favourite books, and some winter gear to Montreal Canada. Landed at the airport at night after a zillion hours, got a taxi and arrived in a dorm room in a university I had never visited. Sat on the floor and cried a while from fatigue and “what am I doing here?” Then met some other new students in the hall, we went to a famous Montreal smoked meat on rye place where I discovered I hated smoked meat.
I didn’t even know what day it was I was so beat, since it was tomorrow back in Sydney, not to mention another season etc.</p>
<p>(Why Canada? Parents were being transferred to LA the following month, first choice (out of 2) was Berkeley, but Berkeley never responded because the Anti Vietnam riots had closed that school down…our family had a connection with Canada, and the Architecture school was top notch…6 months later I got my acceptance to Berkeley with a scholarship, but I was already settled)</p>
<p>For a bunch of old people, we were pretty colorful and tough!!</p>
<p>I bet our children would be surprised to hear some of this stuff about us…</p>
<p>Dragonmom - I had the gold suitcases, too.</p>
<p>
I just flew down to Austin, where it was 108 on Monday, rented a vehicle to get D’s stuff out of storage, drove it to her new place, and did the requisite Target run to buy Tide, etc. I hope I can retire from move-ins now til son’s freshman year move-in in 2012 or so. I wish D lived in driving distance rather than flying distance from her school or that she was able to rent a vehicle…</p>
<p>It was 1976…I had spent the last half of my summer in Honduras as a paramedic. The buildings were riddled with bullet holes, and young men in their army uniforms w/machine guns would walk along with me and my partner, traveling village to village. This area had been involved with the war between Nicaragua & Honduras…It took days to return to the capital city; Tegucigalpa…and fly home. I had one day to wash my clothes, visit with my family and friends and then fly away to school-never having seen the school except in brochures. I did not have a pretty blue AT blue suitcase…just an old green duffle bag. My parents took me to the airport-and off I went. My mom didn’t cry-I did. I often remember that day-and wondered why she didn’t cry. I know why now-and what it took for her to let “me go”.
School had started without me. I was adjusting to being back in the USA-a place where there is running water and electricity with the flick of a button…and being in college. But…Honduras had taught me to be resourceful…and I surely needed that the first couple of weeks of school.
Most of my classes were already filled up-but-I was determined to not get stuck in a class I didn’t want to take, and instead negotiated my way into the classes I wanted. It worked for some classes-but not all.
Like others, I had the ubiquitous electric typewriters-remember onion skin paper so we could erase portions of the paper without having to throw the whole page away?..and a hot pot for Ramen. I had a transistor radio that I would turn on late at night-and be able to get reception for KFRC in the SF Bay Area and Wolfman Jack. The stereo came later.
Sigh…thanks for the trip down memory lane…APOL-a Mum</p>
<p>Re suitcases: my dad had an old leather suitcase that he carried when he was at Butler University in Indianapolis in the early 50s - leather with leather handles, covered with travel stickers from places he went in college and the Air Force. I took it to sleep-away camp when I was nine and it fell apart the last day. I wish we still had it!</p>
<ol>
<li> First in my family to go to college. Drove my 1964 Ford Galaxy XL almost 3 hrs. to the school. Took a lot of stuff (but it all fit in the car) and went by myself. First time away from home, first time on my own.</li>
</ol>
<p>My prized possessions–popcorn popper & hot pot, electric typewriter & sewing machine.</p>
<p>My main memory of move-in day was arriving to find that my roommate had gotten there first and filled our shared closet 3/4 full with her clothes! </p>
<p>I had two gold Samsonite suitcases, and always thought that my grandparents who gave them to me liked my sister better, because she got the pretty blue ones. Thirty years after I received them, I was very happy to give them away. A friend of mine was hosting a little girl from the Ukraine over the summer; the girl arrived with only the raggedy clothes she was wearing, and I was able to provide the suitcases for the new clothes from America she was taking back with her at the end of the summer. That transaction made us both very happy!</p>