As I write this, I’m in the midst of graduate school applications. Amid the flurry of GREs, application fees, and personal statement revisions, it’s suddenly become all too real that next fall I could very easily be living halfway across the country. With that in mind, please forgive my sentimentality and slight deviation from strictly mathe
matical subject matter. It’s time to get a little nostalgic this week and reflect on what the idea of a home means to me.
I spent hours over several weeks sifting through hundreds of programs on the American Mathematical Society’s website, pouring over faculty research interests and statistics about gender diversity, to come up with a final list of about a dozen graduate schools to apply to. Much to my mom’s chagrin, the schools on my final list are dotted across the country, from east to west and north to south.
I grew up in a small, rural town in central Pennsylvania, in the house my parents moved into right after they got married, and where they still live today. My first major move took place early one Saturday morning in late August 2013, and brought me to Hawk Hill. Since then, I’ve also spent summers living in Maryland and Georgia to do research, and four months all the way across the pond studying abroad in Cork, Ireland.
Despite the fact that it sometimes feels like I’m constantly packing or unpacking a suitcase these days, I don’t get homesick. Sure, I miss family and friends and get nostalgic for familiar places at times, but I can’t call it homesickness, because each new place has become a home. They say “home is where the heart is,” and I completely agree.
I think that home is a feeling more than any specific place. It is the feeling of contentment that comes from being surrounded by caring and supportive people and from doing what you love. Home is a group of best friends who have been there for you from the very beginning of freshman year. Home is creating lasting relationships with randomly-selected roommates through taking trips to Rita’s Italian Ice, traipsing around Europe, or making jokes about Ramsey Theory. It is also growing personally and academically over the past three and a half years on Hawk Hill. It is spending days engineering software to solve real world problems or researching interesting mathematical ideas. Even visiting new and exciting places, fulfilling a lifelong dream, can give me a sense of home. I guess to say it another way: I find home to be a sense of fulfillment and an inexplicable feeling of being on the right path. Furthermore, I think that as we move through life, we create a collection of homes that each stay with us even if we never physically return to them.
Even as my stomach ties itself into nervous knots over the looming decision I will be making about graduate school in the not too distant future, I am sure that it will be the right choice. With my passion for math and my love of learning, I have no doubt that whether I end up in North Carolina or Nebraska, this time next year I will have added a new sense of home to those I’ve collected throughout my lifetime.
As the semester draws to a close, I hope that all of the freshmen, finishing their first semester, are beginning to find their own sense of home on Hawk Hill. To my fellow seniors, May 20 is looking way too close, but a little piece of St. Joe’s will stay with us in the friends we’ve made and the lessons we’ve learned.
