Back to the Bay: A Northwestern Student's Return

Hello! My name is Madhuri and I just wrapped up my freshman year at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications in Evanston, Ill. This summer, I will be freelancing for Cupertino Patch through this blog, and I hope you all enjoy following my adventures in the Bay.

To kick off this blog, I thought I would discuss what it was like to leave home for Northwestern, and to be back home for the summer. As most of my college friends might know by now, I have a fierce pride in being from the Bay Area — despite the fact that, up until the moment I left, I was completely ready to leave. I felt as though I had been imprisoned in a sheltered bubble of privilege all my life, and I wanted to see what lay beyond that.

While at school this past year, I rarely experienced homesickness. I thrive when I am forced to live independently, so while it was certainly difficult to adapt to college life, it suited me well. But what I came to realize as the year progressed was that the Bay Area was not the mere bubble of privilege I had deemed it to be. When I came home for winter and spring breaks, I started seeing the Bay differently. When I did not peer at my hometown under the lens of high school-related stress, I realized that it offered me a wealth of opportunities to explore my passions. It had people whose characters I could not have dreamed up or found in any novel — they were completely real and completely incredible.

As a journalism major, I have come to understand that this is true of most, if not all, places. While I was still living at home, I always felt as though I was rebelling against the preconceived notion that I would pursue engineering. Living in the Silicon Valley tends to give off that impression, and I was well aware of that when I entered Medill. However, I now think that it was not so much a rebellion as a desire to tell the stories of the people here in the Bay.

Winter and spring breaks were a bit strange because I felt pressured to see as many people and eat at as many places as possible before almost immediately returning to school. When I arrived at home three days ago, however, it was a different feeling. I have three months to spend here, and knowing that is somewhat surreal. For the next three months, I can once again say I live here. I can revisit my old haunts, as well as explore a bunch of new places. I can take my time to relax, because I have plenty of time to do everything I want to. What I struggle with now, though, is the idea that I have two separate lives.

Perhaps this is not unique to my being a Northwestern student; I think many students who travel to go to school can empathize. I have one life here in the valley with my family and my high school friends, and I have another life back at school. I still do not know how to reconcile the two, and I am not even sure I need to. It was valuable for me to realize that no matter where I go, I can find people I care about and who care about me, and that I can find a way to be happy in both places.

But college has almost certainly changed me, and every time I come home, someone points out how I have changed over the months. On the one hand, I am attending my dream school, and I am forming memories to last a lifetime. On the other, I feel as though I am clinging to the Bay Area while it slowly slips away. It will always be an important part of my identity, but it is no longer the sole headlining act.

I have no idea where I am going to go after I graduate. I try to tell myself that I still have at least three years left of school, but considering how quickly my freshman year went, the future no longer seems so far away. Maybe it is just a mark of my own naïveté, but I sometimes worry that after college, I am going to lose contact with both of the aforementioned lives. I am reminded time and again that I will always be able to hold on to what I truly care about, but that is little reassurance when I consider how quickly the world moves around me.

The silver lining here is my relationship with my friends from the Bay. Wherever I go, I can usually find Bay Area natives not too far away. I have run into them at airports, in downtown Chicago, even at school. Whether we are friends or strangers, we immediately bond over our hometowns. There is nothing quite like the small joys the Bay has to offer. Pearl milk tea after a long day, an evening at the park, a Saturday afternoon poolside, beautiful weather, the feeling that this is home — when I run into others from the Bay, these are the things about which we reminisce. We long for In-N-Out and Asian cuisine, and weather that does not encompass all four seasons in the span of four hours.

These are parts of my life that my college friends will never be able to fully understand, but the fact that they try to do so means the world to me. And there are parts of their pasts and their home lives that I will never understand either — but that is what is so wonderful about college. It can be unnerving to think that I do not know about the past 18 years of some of my friends’ lives, but it is also exciting because we have so many stories we can share.

Northwestern and the Midwest are completely different from the Bay — the accents, the demographics, the cuisines, the academics, the social atmosphere, the culture — and yet, they are all part of my identity now. I will continue to grapple with what home means to me, but while I am back in the Bay for the summer, I will focus on telling the stories here. I wrote for Cupertino High School’s The Prospector for three years, and I have missed that a great deal. So yes, being back at home may feel surreal, and it may feel as though the part of my life that exists at Northwestern is missing, but there is so much to explore here in the valley, and I am ready for the adventure.