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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rodrigo Istalindir" data-source="post: 2954423" data-attributes="member: 2810">I can remember back that far <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Let me dissent a little.  Sooner or later, you're going to have be a little more independent.  Nows a good time to start.  It will be rough at first, and you're going to be tempted to call home every night, sit around the dorm and mope, etc.Start right now steeling yourself not to do that.  Don't cut yourself off completely, but start with calling home every other day.  Get that down to 1/week if you can.  If you find yourself not making (or breaking) plans to do something so you can go back to the dorm and call home, that's probably not good.  Also, keep the trips home to a minimum.  Fall semester, maybe one trip in early October after you've settled in, then its just a few weeks to Thanksgiving, then a short hop to Christmas.With your own room it's going to be really easy to retreat, so you'll need to make an extra effort to get out.  (In the olden days when it was 2 or 3 people to a single room, it was a lot harder to hide).   Eat in the dining halls/cafeterias instead of cooking or ordering food and eating in your room.  Find on-campus gaming clubs, or other interest groups.  Most decent sized universities have a student group for just about everything under the sun.  Early on I got involved in the student judicial system and the group that organized guest lecturers.  Neither sucked up an inordinate amount of time, and neither was something I thought I'd be interested in and just sort of fell into, but ended up being something I did till I graduated.Talk with your parents about this.  Some parents have as hard a time as the students, and if they are pressuring you to call every night or come home every weekend, it's going to be rough on you.  Hopefully they went to college too, so they'll understand how easy it is to get totally swamped.  Email is a great alternative.  IM less so, since that creates the expectation of an instantaneous response.Finally, if you are really worried about this, identify student mental health resources ahead of time.  Almost everyone gets homesick, and the college will have people on staff who are experienced in dealing with this.  There's nothing wrong with talking to someone, and its all confidential so you don't have to worry about roommates teasing you or whatever.  It can be really hard to tell the difference between a bad bout of chronic homesickness and real depression.Good luck -- I bet by the end of Christmas break, you'll be anxious to get back to your new friends and activities at school./old man voiceMan, kids today.  Freshman semester, they were overbooked and I got stuck for a month in a room with 3 other guys.  There were 56 students on the floor, and there were two communal bathrooms iwth communal showers.  No maid service, no cable TV in our rooms till junior year.  No email, no IM.  Long-distance phone calls cost an arm and a leg.   If we wanted to watch TV, we had a common room that the whole floor shared.  Same with the kitchen.  Enrollment was 36,000 and they were trying to cut that to 33,000, so there was very little effort on the part of the U to cut anybody any slack.  It was an absolute blast.</blockquote>

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