Dear nostalgic seniors,
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I am beginning to feel homesick. Family Weekend brought a lot of love and bits of home to campus, yet the void of home still exists. Regardless if you had a Bryn Mawr summer or moved back in just five weeks ago, it is normal to long for the feeling of home.
Even after four years, leaving never gets easier. However, this year, the feeling of homesickness has evolved. With just 230 days left until graduation, I preemptively am feeling homesick from Villanova. Every time I drive off campus, there is a part of me that remembers there are only so many more times I will drive down Lancaster Ave as a Villanova student.
We are already almost half-way done with the semester, marking us a quarter of the way done with senior year. Each time I get an email reminding me about events or activities just for seniors, I feel a part of me that is just not ready for this season of our lives. We all joke about the meaning of Villanova being “new home,” but over the years we spend here it becomes exactly that. In each dorm, apartment or house we live in, we leave our mark. Every class we take opens our minds to new ideas, and every club we join helps us express our passions. We grow as people and we find communities that evolve into families.
I have been struggling on how to balance living in the moment with recording all the memories. The answer? There is no perfect balance. Either way, one will fall behind the other and that is okay. While I wish there could constantly be a camera following, recording all the highlights from the year, there simply cannot be and it will fall to our memories to hold on to some of these special moments.
The beauty of it all is that there are so many senior year memories to be made. Nights out with friends, Senior Pub Series events or even just going on walks around the local neighborhoods and reconnecting with people you might not have seen in a while. These are the moments to relish and savor now, before we all disperse into different cities and places in life post-graduation.
Homesickness never gets easier, and many of us might not be moving back home after graduation. We will be exploring new cities and new opportunities, adding an even deeper second level of homesickness. Yet, with new opportunities comes excitement.
In August of 2022, as I packed up my childhood bedroom and got ready to move five hours away to Pennsylvania, there was doubt that I could ever love this small town of Villanova more than I loved my home, my friends and my family. How I was wrong.
Of course, I still love those three aspects of my life dearly. However, the people here do not lie when they say the Villanova community is unmatched. Now, as I look around my senior year apartment, I see the notecards of words of encouragement that my parents wrote me during my Orientation freshman year, I see pictures with people I am lucky to call my closest friends from college, who I know will be in my life forever and I see proof of how I have changed since coming to Villanova.
Change can be scary, but it can also be necessary, and while I know as of now I am not ready to leave this school that I consider home, the changes that will come from the next chapter of our lives will continue to push us to be the best versions of ourselves possible. I have the same doubts about the next steps of life as I did back in 2022, but if the past four years have taught me anything, it is that it is okay to feel homesick. It just means that you love a place and the people so much that they are worth missing.
With love always,
Lauren
