by S Morris

Created on: July 06, 2010   Last Updated: July 19, 2010

Going to college can be an exciting time. New school, new friends, new classes, new teachers, new everything. It's also the first time many students will be living away from home. Dealing with all the new can be exciting but it can also be scary. Living away from home for the first time can make you feel lonely and overwhelmed. However, you can learn to adjust to your new environment and embrace the exciting parts of college while coping with the hard parts.

The day you move out of your home and into your dorm or apartment will probably be the day you meet your roommate (or roommates) for the first time. You will be sharing a new experience and a living area so it pays to get to know this stranger. You may never be best friends, but if you learn a little about each other it can make the situation less awkward and even fun. Even just going for lunch together a couple times a week can make it more comfortable when you're both (or all) watching TV together. Rather than sitting next to a stranger, you'll be sitting next to a friend.

As you go to class, you may miss having your seat to go to where you'd be surrounded by your high school friends. You can see this as losing your old friends, but you should try to see it as having an opportunity to gain new friends. The other students in your class probably feel the same as you do and would welcome getting to know you. Simply saying hi to the students sitting next to you can turn into a friendship by the end of a long semester as saying hi turns into chatting for a few minutes before class and then going for lunch after class sometime.

Having friends to surround yourself with helps with the initial loneliness that living away from home for the first time can cause, but there are other stresses as well. You can miss the simple things of home life, like a home cooked dinner or not having to do your own laundry. One way to reduce the sadness of missing those homey touches is to embrace the independence that comes with doing them for yourself. Buy or borrow some cookbooks and learn to cook in your dorm's kitchen or using a microwave only. Try wacky recipes and have friends over to taste your experiments. Get together with your roommate to do laundry every week. It may be boring but it doesn't have to be lonely.

The last step is to remember that as you get into your new college life, you will feel better. There are always times when you will feel lonely, but that happens to everyone sometimes. However, as you dive into your beautiful new school, your fun new friends, your fascinating new classes, and your (hopefully) reasonable new teachers, you will find that change can sometimes be quite good.

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