Homecoming!

HOMECOMING!!

This is my very first UVA homecoming as an alumnus...It's so sad! But I'm excited to be going back to visit my alma mater this weekend. I think it's interesting the difference between how people treat their undergraduate alma mater and how they treat their post-grad alma mater. Will my cohort members be as excited to come back to visit Penn as I am to go back to UVA? I guess since I spent 4 years there, it's easy for that school to have become my home, but being at Penn for only 2 years isn't really going to allow us to form the same bonds to the area or to the school.

Recently, I was having a conversation with one of my friends from my cohort about going home after finishing this program. He's from California, and he was expressing how he's more than ready to go back. It's funny because, as I told him, I feel like I don't actually have a home to go back to. At least, not in the same way he does. My parents live in Trinidad and Tobago, and while I still have a room and a place there, that hasn't felt like home since I left it 4 years ago to go to UVA.

I feel like, and I don't mean to be cliche, my home is seriously where my heart is. So when I went to UVA, far, far away from my high school and the friends I had there, my home was UVA. And when I made friends there, I wanted to stay because that's where my home was. When I came to Penn, I had exactly the same experience. I just sort of adapted and made new friends and Penn became my home.

It kind of makes it so that I don't know what's going to happen next, but it also makes it easier for me to think about going to a new place. Like how easy it was for me to go to Japan and make new friends when I went two summers ago. I'm considering moving out to California when I finish this program in two years, and I can just imagine how much of an adventure it will be, and how great it'll be to meet new people there and find my place all over again.

So I guess that what I've realized is that, although I wish I was one of those people who had a specific and concrete "home base", I'm glad I'm one of those people who can live wherever her heart goes. But for now, I'm happy with my heart (and my home) at Penn.