During my visits to Georgetown both before and after applying, as well as during NSO, virtually every student speaker made a point to mention how Georgetown had become their home.
I didn’t buy it. The idea sounded like a bullet point tacked onto an informational brochure minutes before printing by some frantic intern. The college search process forced me to examine the constant praise, merited or not, that schools heap upon themselves in the hope of attracting a few more students. With at least a little cynicism, this sentiment of Georgetown as a “new home” never came across to me as truly genuine.
But I was not looking for a new home in college, so my suspicions mattered little. I envisioned college as a waypoint, a transition between two segments of life. College, to me, was a place to find my own path and take in new experiences before leaving the campus behind after four years. As a prospective student, Georgetown’s value resided in the lessons I could take from it and the opportunities it could present me. The possibility of a school becoming a second home was simply not a priority.
The relatively short time I would be able spend at Georgetown, or any other college, also made searching for a home within a college seem counterproductive. My own perspective on the definition of a “home” might be a little warped, though, due to my own good fortune regarding stability. The word “home,”for me, conjures up a series of static images: a white house standing in the Southern Maryland countryside with a red barn in the front yard and woods behind it, or my bedroom, a small, comfortable space enclosed by white walls plastered with New York Mets and Legend of Zelda posters. Although I lived in a different house for my first year of life, I have no memory of it, and for all intents and purposes, that old, creaking, and charmingly imperfect house is the only home I have ever known.
Since my only experience of home is eighteen uninterrupted years in the same location, it follows that I could not have expected any college to take on that role within four years broken up by winter, spring, and summer breaks—Georgetown simply could not compete with the house of which every detail has been permanently etched into my brain. This is no slight against Georgetown; it was an error in my own puerile conception of what a home is, and one moment last semester fundamentally altered my flawed view.
Last semester, soon after my last final, I was packing my bags and preparing to return to Maryland, when a thought entered my mind. “I’m one-eighth of my way through my time at Georgetown.” This idea stuck itself into my consciousness, refusing to exit my mind for the rest of the day, and the only feeling it brought was sadness. Georgetown had gradually, though much more rapidly than I expected, grown on me. Although the environment had never seemed completely foreign, my first few weeks here had been marked by restlessness. It was all too easy to feel lost in the crowd. My days lacked any sense of routine. Each series of events felt disjointed, almost as if I was sleepwalking through them.
At some point though, I woke up. A routine developed, and the restlessness that permeated my early times here gave way to excitement for each new day. Those large crowds that first made me feel isolated instead began to bring a sense of community. I started to carve out my own niche in Georgetown’s broad landscape. Dahlgren Quad became my preferred location when all I needed was silence, and Lau, much to my chagrin, became my place of residence on many Sunday nights after days of neglected homework. Over time, simple experiences, like walking into Red Square and seeing it covered in chalk designs, or taking a walk through the neighborhood with no destination in mind, or staying up far too late talking with a group of friends, transformed my views of Georgetown and of what a home really is. What I view as my home, I would say now, should have little to do with the amount of time that I spend there. It is an important factor, but it is not, as I had previously assumed, the most important. Instead, to be at home is to be at peace, and, even after just one semester here, I feel at peace at Georgetown.
