Here Comes the Family!

Hi everyone! It’s Jalen, and this week I want to talk about Family Weekend.

Family Weekend is a time for the family members of Carleton students — most especially freshmen — to come on campus and really experience what they do. They have the opportunity to visit classes, go to seminars, even attend our weekly convocation.

My parents came, and we had such a great time. They attended my philosophy class that afternoon. We had just started a new book concerning Socrates and his teachings about life and political community, and although they couldn’t particularly understand the nuanced details of the conversation, they enjoyed they lecture.

My mom even pointed out that she found the fact that Socrates never wrote any doctrine himself quite interesting. Everyone talks about what he did and what he thought—but he never did any of the writing himself.

We ate in the Sayles Café for their first time (they loved it!), I caught them up on a few things that was going on with me with my Mock Trial experience and how much I love my classes, and we visited the bookstore so they could get some Carleton gear for themselves.

The next day we attended the homecoming for our football team. I’m not the biggest fan of football, and I was clueless almost the entire time, so that was fun. But I still think it was a great time, especially since we ended up winning! The celebration afterward was great, and then I sent my parents on their way back home.

This is a picture of my mother and me before my parents left. She got so many souvenirs!

I think, for me, it was very interesting to learn of everyone else’s experience for Family Weekend. Most of my friends and floormates, if they weren’t already, became really homesick. I still haven’t had that happen.

In these few weeks that I’ve been away from home, I haven’t missed home. And I’ve never been away from home for an extended period of time, so it’s not that this experience of being away is familiar. I just don’t miss home.

So if you feel the same way as I do, whatever the reason that you do, it’s okay. Someone else understands that feeling. It’s not the most common, but it’s normal to feel this way.

If you ever need someone to talk about when it comes to emotions and thoughts that you think aren’t necessarily indicative of what college “should” be, feel free to email me. My email is attached to my name in the bio. Thank you all so much for reading this, and I’ll see you all next week!

Jalen

Jalen is a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed freshman with the intention of becoming a psychology major. He has always loved the show SpongeBob since he was a child, and he recently found out that the voice actor for SpongeBob and the voice actress for Karen (Plankton’s computer wife) have been married since 1995! Also, he kind of wants to be a philosophy minor, but we’ll see lol. Meet the other bloggers!