By Luke Williams
You step out of your car after hours of driving, and step onto your new home for the next three months. You don’t know anyone, you don’t know the area around you, and you don’t even know much about the state that you’re in.
For many freshman college students, it can be intimidating to start living on your own on campus, away from your own house. However, there are several students who go a step beyond this, and move far away to colleges out of state. These people will be put into an entirely new environment, miles away from family and friends.
Jackson King, who has received a scholarship for Central Methodist University in Fayette Missouri, plans to study business management.
“I’d say it’s intimidating because it’s seven hours away, so a whole day trip away from everybody that I know,” King says.
His scholarship for baseball will cover the full cost of admission to the college. Despite this financial opportunity for Jackson, he is nervous about leaving behind his family and friends in another state.
“They reached out to me about baseball, and then from there I went step by step in the recruiting process,” King says.
Jackson isn’t the only student that is nervous about moving away from family. Rylen Jones is going to the University of Alabama, located in the town of Tuscaloosa, to study nursing. She’s also nervous about leaving people behind.
“I’m very excited about pursuing what I love, and I’m nervous about just being kind of far away from home,” Jones said.
Despite not having a scholarship similar to Jackson’s, she’s still determined to study here, and after seeing the campus in person, her interest in the college only grew further. On a two-day trip to the college, she learned more about the campus there, and got a taste of what living there would be like.
When deciding on a college to go to, one of the main aspects she was looking for was the environment around the college. She picked Alabama due to the warm weather, the large college, and also the small town surrounding the campus, similar to home.
“The location’s pretty good, it’s a small town atmosphere, so kinda like home, but it’s different,” Jones said.
However, not everyone will be entirely alone in these new areas. Rebekah Thorpe is moving to Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and she is moving close to family members already in the area.
BYU is a Mormon school, sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Her grandparents attended there, and it seems that she’ll get back into the college after her parents went elsewhere for college. There, she will study neuroscience.
“I’m also really excited because I want to get out of Muncie and get out of Indiana, and get out and travel,” Thorpe said.
While she will be close to family, this doesn’t mean it will be easy for her to move away from her family in Indiana. In particular, she is worried about moving away from her sisters, with whom she has a close relationship.
While she is excited to meet new people, she is also nervous about the same thing, due to the fact that she won’t have many familiar friends to fall back on.
Finally, traveling to Youngstown State University in Ohio, Abram Stitt is moving away on a sports scholarship to study computer science.
Despite the college reaching out to him first about attending their college, Abram believes that the environment is nice around this area in Ohio, and he is looking forward to living on his own.
Like many other students traveling out of state, he was motivated by the environment that Youngstown provides in comparison to Indiana. With Abram, however, he considered the distance to be not as much of an issue as others, partially because of its relative proximity to home.
“It’s only five hours away from home, so it’s like somewhere in the middle of long distance and short,” Stitt says.
All of these students have several things in common, one of the most potent is the idea that moving away from home can be intimidating to act on. Going so far away from home, knowing little to no people there is a scary thought for many people.
However, all of them are moving forward with their plans to go far away. So, whether it’s five hours or fifteen hours away, these students are dedicated to achieving their goals, no matter how far away it takes them.
