- Home-cooked meals are a thing.
Living on campus for three months means many, many meal swipes. As wonderful as Sunday brunch at Wilbur or Indian night at FloMo are, nothing can quite compete with the aroma of fresh basil wafting from the kitchen as my mom cooks her homemade pomodoro sauce. Plus, these meals are blessedly free of charge (if you don’t count the obligatory dishwashing at the end of the meal).
- Distance can be good.
It can be easy to get caught up in the “Stanford bubble” and it’s difficult to evaluate your life while in the middle of midterms and final papers. Coming home was an optimal time to look back on the quarter and think about how I’d spent my first block of time at Stanford. As somebody who thinks better when I write things down, I journalled plenty over break, and looking back on the quarter once I was back at home allowed me to more clearly evaluate my experiences during the fall and create goals for my second quarter at college. For example, I learned the importance of remembering that I actually had meal plan dollars to spend at on-campus eateries (the result of forgetting this was treating multiple dorm-mates to Late Night the last night of the quarter in a desperate attempt to spend my money).
- I missed the welcoming community that is my Stanford dorm.
While this might seem cliché and perhaps not very unexpected, this revelation was actually fairly surprising to me. As an introvert who was sometimes overwhelmed by the chaotic nature of dorm life, I was taken aback by how fondly I thought about the dorm environment while on break. There is something very special about living together with other like-minded individuals who are passionate about vastly different activities and academic subjects. The camaraderie of this type of environment is something that I missed when I returned to the quiet of my home.
- Seamlessly falling back into my high school friend groups.
Returning home and visiting my high school friends reminded me of my everyday life as it existed before college. It was interesting to me how even though my high school friends and I had made new college friends, we interacted with each other as though we had never left. Seeing old friends was a reminder of myself as I had existed in high school. As my roommate commented, there is something beautiful about having people in our lives who have known us for an extended period of time, who remember certain parts of us and keep those parts alive with them until we reconnect.
- How much it felt like I never left.
Returning to life at home made college feel almost like a distant dream. Having returned home during my high school years after countless summer programs, college felt like a similar experience. Realizing that I would in fact be going back to Stanford after the three-week hiatus from work and dorm life was mildly disconcerting, but I felt for the most part extremely grateful that the Stanford community I was returning to was so positive and welcoming.
Contact Julie Plummer at jplummer ‘at’ stanford.edu.