Beginning the college career is a rough time for many students, especially for those who are leaving home for the first time. After all, you are leaving behind your friends, family, and hometown in order to travel somewhere completely new and begin an entirely fresh chapter in your life. In most cases, you will not be going to the same school as your group of high school friends, so you will also need to build up an entirely new circle of buddies. All of this, coupled with the stress involved in relocating, causes many students to get hit hard with a bad case of the homesick blues.
Homesickness essentially boils down to a longing for the familiar and comfortable. When you are surrounded by unknowns and unpredictability, which is the case when you must cope with adjusting to an entirely new lifestyle and new faces, you will inevitably long for the comforts of the home and people that you have known for a long time. The relationships that you’ve grown up with took years to cultivate. To suddenly have those relationships and that social network torn from you can be a traumatizing event. No wonder college students feel sad during the first few weeks of classes!
The best way to combat these feelings is to move on and create new social networks. Sure, it may seem strange at first to go to the movies with a new group of people rather than with your best friends from home, but it is crucial to your enjoyment of college to make a new group of buddies. You never know, someday you may even get to join your hometown pals with your college buddies. Though the prospect of making new friends can be daunting at first, it is not actually that difficult. Your roommates or neighbors are good candidates for new friendships because these are people that you will see every day. However, if you do not happen to click with them, there are other options as well. Luckily, many first year students at universities are also looking to build new friendships, so you will find that a great number of your classmates are extra friendly. Take advantage of this and talk to a number of different people until you find those who you can most relate with. You can even join an intramural sports team or a school club to meet like-minded people. Soon, you will find yourself laughing and enjoying the college life with a new group of pals as your homesick blues melt away.
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