Feeling homesick? Here's advice for dealing with new or transfer student blues

As a transfer student, this September marked not just the start of a new academic year but also the beginning of my second year at Rutgers—New Brunswick. Prior to transferring, I attended the Camden campus for two years.

After coming to the New Brunswick campus, I shared my experiences as a transfer student acclimatizing to the new culture in my first article for The Daily Targum.

So, it’s been a little more than a year now, and although I'm still proud of the piece I wrote back then, one aspect of moving to any new location I failed to mention was addressing the issue of homesickness.

It's something with which I'm sure we're all familiar — the bittersweet companion to the unambiguously delicious delight of establishing independence for the first time may leave people feeling conflicted during an otherwise momentous occasion.

If this describes you right now, as a first-year or a transfer student like I was, I thought it might be productive today to examine the issue of homesickness and what steps can be taken to alleviate your uncertain feelings about new circumstances.

As someone familiar with the feeling, much of my advice comes from my own experience with homesickness — all this to say, I've been there.

Make your new house a home

As kitschy and trite as it might sound, you should make a conscious effort to personalize your space with the help of decorations. Even if you only plan to live there for a year, whatever decor you choose to liven up your living space will translate nicely wherever you end up next. So be sure to pick out some posters or other items to help make the place truly your own.

Better yet, depending on your living situation, your decorations can help break the ice with your new roommates. I'm assuming most of you reading this are somewhere along on your collegiate journey (presumably earlier in the process, but homesickness doesn't have a certain timeline), so you're likely living in somewhat close proximity to a roster of strangers.

Alternatively, if you've already established some rapport with your roommates, a new decoration of any overlapping interests will further solidify your camaraderie.

For example, last year, my roommates and I adored "Persona 5 Royal." We'd often stay up all hours of the night — grinding palace progression and experience points, trying to fuse the strongest personas we could (often at the unfortunate cost of our actual social and academic lives).

Eventually, I got this banner for our living room featuring the game's "Phantom Thieves" logo. Although it was a bit bigger than I had anticipated, it fit in quite nicely with the smudged windows and missing ceiling tiles of our apartment on Cook campus and served as a mood enhancer for all of us.

Explore your new area

Keeping with the trend of accepting your new living situation as home, it often helps to become familiar with your new surroundings and explore what's around you.

The difficulty of this may vary depending on your new circumstances. If you're moving to a college campus (or alternatively, somewhere off-campus in a college town), it's likely your school has organized some community activities to encourage students to get to know one another, especially around the beginning of a new academic year.

Alternatively, if going to a large social gathering fills you with dread, you might benefit from exploring what student organizations your school offers. With the increasingly wide variety of clubs and organizations that students are forming, you'll likely find some group in which you have an interest. Given enough engagement, you’ll forget how much you missed home.

Keep in contact with those from home

This suggestion will vary depending on exactly how far you may be from home, but just because you may be living somewhere new now absolutely doesn’t mean you have to cut off all contact from your previous life.

On the contrary, your family likely misses you as much as you miss them, possibly more. For the unaware, there's a colloquial term in psychology that goes along with homesickness called "empty nest syndrome," which details a phenomenon where parents of children who leave home are left with a feeling similar to grief.

In many ways, this mirrors what many people say about homesickness, so a good way to get over missing your family is by calling them. It may be impractical to visit them frequently, but with society's mass adoption of Zoom as a result of the pandemic, it's likely your family has some degree of video-calling experience. It's a great way to strengthen a feeling of connection to them, even if it may be digital.

To put it quite plainly, moving somewhere new can suck. Especially if your circumstances create some disconnect with the rest of your cohort, it can feel like you don’t belong there or like everybody already knows something you’re still struggling to figure out.

No matter how you try to spin it positively, homesickness is rough and it's OK to embrace and accept that feeling. Trust me, I've been there before. But as I'm typing this, having been on this campus for more than a year now, with my "Phantom Thieves" banner displayed just to the right of my monitor, I can tell you it gets easier. You have to take the plunge and push to expand your boundaries. Good luck, and welcome home!