peer response

This blog is a peer response to Btown Folk’s response about being far from home. Btown Folk wrote about moving away from home after living in the same town for such a long time. He made a big leap from going from a small town, to a huge school like IU with 40,000 people. He soon was able to connect with a small, close-knit group of people, so he was able to feel more like he was at home.

When I first came to IU, I thought that I would never see anyone I knew because the campus is just so big. I knew that I would have to fit in somewhere and find my own “folk group”, but it just didn’t seem possible with that many students. Four years ago, on my first day as a freshman, I realized that two people from my high school were living on the floor right below me. I couldn’t believe it and knew that I would be able to find my own group. Over the next several weeks, as I joined Hillel, the Jewish group on campus, I started noticing more and more people I knew. Everywhere I went, I would see people I knew from Hillel and it would just amaze me that with a campus so big, I would be able to connect with so many people so quickly. Even within Hillel, I met people who went to my camp and we would be able to sit for hours and just share things that no one else would understand. I didn’t even know they went to school at IU, but they introduced me to people they knew and it just snowballed into a huge group.

There is just something that makes me feel good when I walk through campus and randomly see people I know. It makes me feel even better when I haven’t seen them in a long time and get to reconnect. I hope that this will continue on when I move away from IU and get a job somewhere else. I am looking forward to the day when I run into someone I met from IU and can just stand in the middle of the street and reminisce.