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Life

Senior Year: Family Weekend Without Family

This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Dickinson chapter.

For the past three years at Dickinson, I’ve enjoyed the fall schedule and how often that allows me to see my family. For both my first and second years, my parents came to visit me for family weekend. For the third, I was abroad in England and just too far for my family to visit as frequently. For my final year, was I going to invite my family? The family that hails from New York City, these are the kind of people who get bored at the prospect of just spending the entire weekend in Walmart. This year, things changed. 

While I was abroad, I missed the chance to say good-bye to all of my senior friends. They had spent semesters abroad while I was still here and the only chance we had was the summers in between school. Being so busy preparing to go abroad, I didn’t have the time or money to go out and visit them. Luckily, there’s that one special weekend in September just for people to visit. So, for Family & Homecoming Weekend, my friends came to visit. 

I won’t lie, it was a strange experience. I spent the first three weeks back growing accustomed to seeing new faces and not having my old friends on campus like it used to be. How was I supposed to deal with the shock of seeing them? I think I handled it surprisingly well. We hugged, reminisced and then planned out our weekend. 

The weekend was spent trying to avoid going to any homecoming events and just hanging out together as friends. It was a refreshing take on previous years where my family came all the way from New York City to a small town they’ve never heard of. With my friends, they remembered all the ins and outs of Carlisle and the fun things we could do together. I missed them so much while I was abroad and having them visit made returning to Dickinson so much better. 

So if family weekend is coming up next time, consider just spending the time with your friends. You never know what might happen!

Julia Mercado

Dickinson '20

Julia is an English major who just loves to write. You can normally find her looking for the next Netflix original to watch... or coming up with her own script ideas. With Her Campus, she hopes to reach out to other college women like her!