SSU the Junior College

**********This is my most recent SSU Newspaper article, it has been out for 2 days and I am getting a buncha facebook messages about it already @_@ : ). Glad to see I am stirring the pot as it was my goal, also just a rant to make me feel better******************

There is a time and a place for everything and its called college. After hearing this from various adults during my adolescence I simply couldn’t wait to dive into all the inappropriate situations waiting for me at this lustful university of wonder. College would be the place to meet new people, do everything I was ever told not to and possibly fit an education in between my learning’s at the drunken dances. Overall you go to college to experience college life and become part of it. This is why I am so confused as to why so many students leave so often to go home?

It seems that damn near every friend I have at this university will go home at least once every three weeks? I am here to be in college and experience it to its fullest. To me this includes the weekends, but apparently I’m alone. With the enormous amount of people going home all the time, the college atmosphere and social scene slows to a dribble each and every weekend. Could you tell me exactly how many people left SSU to go to other cooler colleges last Halloween, because I lost count?

Although recently Sonoma seems to have flourished with a number of worthy parties to attend, I still feel this weekend commuting bullshit is a problem. Every single weekend at least four to five of my friends go home and I am not just talking about those whose homes are in Santa Rosa. They leave for the entire weekend for reasons that I am told are very, very important. Most of the time it’s their relatives birthday or they haven’t seen their parents in awhile (a whole month), or their grandparents are in town. The list of excuses seems just as endless as the list of justifications to exactly why “I really have to go, I can’t NOT go”. I then propose the question: “If you were going to school out of state would you still go?” The response I usually get is silence; meaning no, they wouldn’t. They simply choose to go but in reality don’t HAVE to.

I know many of you come here to attend a college close to home and I understand this. You want(need) to be able to return home regularly, but I think that once every month or two is a bit much and makes “going to college” rather pointless. So much for experiencing new and exciting things let alone independence.

I’m just going to go ahead and say it. A lot of the people who come to SSU are settling. There. The unspoken was just spoken. I’ve picked up this vibe among students AND teachers from day one and continued to have this attitude supported and reinforced by my peers throughout my stay here. The attitude that SSU is cool but not that cool. It’s a good college, but “meh”. SSU was not too many students number one college choice when a head count was done in one of my classes. As well, more than a couple people I knew were “so” going to transfer the moment they got the chance.

Maybe this is the reason people go home so much? Or because they aren’t mature enough to face new challenges, make new friends, meet new people on their own? They go back to their comfortable hometown where everything is settled and waiting for you?

Wherever the reason may lie, half the student community leaving school every weekend is seriously deteriorating my college experience. I came here to be in college, at college, among college students. I came to stay, not to visit. Am I alone in my endeavor? As for the rest of you, if next labor day you think you’re the only living student on campus, don’t feel alone as somewhere around here there will be a frustrated journalist posting on his blog about how especially dead campus is during this weekend.