I stood in the second floor girls wing of Walz Hall during the orientation hall meeting, shuffled a little off to the side, staring at the grey carpet. A girl from my orientation group had brought me back to her dorm for the hour long “hall meet” scheduled into orientation. Around 30 girls were seated in a circle in the hall on chairs and the floor. I was the only girl standing, and trying not to draw attention to myself. After the RA introduced herself, she began with hall ice breakers, and, because I was the closest to her, suddenly pointed at me, and asked me for my name and what I did over the summer. All eyes turned to look at me. I started to answer, then cut myself off.
“Wait — I’m a commuter. I don’t even live here. Why am I even answering this?”
The first few weeks of school were more of the same — I was given a worksheet in my French class that asked multiple questions about the life in my dorm. I couldn’t answer any of those. Because, well, I didn’t live in a dorm.
I was one of about five commuting freshmen in the class of 2019, and I spent my first two years driving back and forth to campus from my parents’ home. I only just moved onto campus this year, as a junior.
In conversation, I kept my reasons purely financial. My parents and I chose Muhlenberg for its proximity to my childhood home in Emmaus, one town over. It made more sense to both me and my parents to invest $3,000 in a new car that I would use until I was 25 than to shell out six times that much per year for me to move 20 minutes down the road. I took on the lightest meal plan I could, worked two once-a-week jobs to pay for gas money and to build my savings.
In reality, I was very much convinced that life in a hall was something that I did not want. Why would I willingly jam myself in a shoebox of a room with dingy classroom floors that would never be clean, furniture that had seen god knows what, with a stranger who I had never met before who would have access to all my possessions (including my journals and my tampons) every day for an entire academic year, when I could have my own space with my own cat and my own bathroom, that didn’t cost my parents a thing? (Splurging an extra $1,000 dollars on a single in Taylor was out of the question. I was an underclassman, after all, and already on the lowest meal plan to save my parents another $1,000 dollars).
By the end of the year, it became clear that I had made the right choice. I made the Dean’s List and by the second semester was a budding reporter, taking on the title of News Editor for The Muhlenberg Weekly, despite being on campus literally only for classes, lunch, and the newspaper.
Despite knowing all of this, one of my best friends called me sheltered “because of the commuting sitch,” and I would have written them off had another friend not said the same, unprompted, at a different time. I’ve received praise from administration for getting myself involved on campus despite being a commuter, and while doing research for a project, I was told that statistically students who live closer to campus do better academically than students who live off campus.
In reality, living with my parents for two more years wasn’t a challenge to overcome, and it certainly isn’t a sign of weakness or coddling. Undoubtedly, I’m sure a lot of students wished they had that luxury. The simple fact that students are expected to be okay with leaving the homes we’ve lived in and the friends we’ve known for 18 years to live in a new environment with a total stranger is completely ludicrous when you think about it.
I was already going through a lot of changes as a freshman, from learning the ins and outs of syllabi, lectures, college-level essay writing and exams, in a new environment with new people. I walked into the dining hall about two weeks into the semester and realized, for the first time in 10 years, I was in a room full of my peers where I didn’t recognize a single face. In the midst of all this change, it was nice to come home to my childhood room and a home cooked meal. Having this consistency actually made my transition into college easier.
And there’s nothing wrong with taking the easy way out. It doesn’t make me any less of a member of the community or any less a student because I didn’t have a door with my name on it.
That being said, I did miss out on a lot those first two years — which is one of the reasons I decided to move out.
Now that I’ve better established myself on campus, have a stable friend group, and have moved up into management on The Weekly, it’s more necessary for me to be close by. And, quite frankly, more enjoyable.
I never realized how much of student life was devoted to sharing space with people who are just as clueless as you. Something as simple as doing homework in a group at 1 a.m. at the library, or going grocery shopping with a group on a Saturday, or having someone to go out to a fancy lunch with once a week — those are the things I missed in living at home. But they were also things I wouldn’t have been able to do as a freshman without the friends I’ve made since then.
In the end, I don’t regret living at home for an extra two years (And my parents’ wallets certainly don’t either). In honesty, I kind of miss it. My limited hours on campus forced me to use my time on campus wisely, and ll it with as many appointments, interviews, and faculty office hours as I could, and then I would return to my room to focus on the rest of my work.
Nowadays my evenings are filled with dinner with friends, study sessions at the library, interviews for The Weekly, PetSmart night shifts, walks in the park across the street, and hanging out in friends’ dorms. It takes a juggling act to get everything done, and navigating that schedule as a freshman would have been nearly impossible.
Next year, I’ll be living just up from campus. My best friend and co-editor Lauren and I are going to move in together to a MILE house and we honestly can’t wait to be roomates. We’d wanted to be roommates, but before I got a job it wasn’t possible for me. Now, I have something to make my senior year special — living with my best friend.
And I have no doubt, just like waiting to move out, that will be the right choice for me, too.
