Moving Into Penn State Goes Smoothly for Students and Families

Penn State freshman Conor Tunno says, in a way, he’d been preparing for his move into his dorm room in Curtin Hall since sophomore year of high school.

“That’s when my brother started coming here, and I would always visit him and I just started loving this place,” Tunno says.

Having spent countless weekends on campus for regional high school swim meets and Nittany Lion football games, Tunno says he couldn’t imagine coming anywhere else.

Tunno was one of thousands of students to descend on Penn State’s campus Saturday to move in and get ready for the upcoming fall semester. Though many students and families frantically scurried between dorm rooms and cars with trolleys filled with boxes and personal effects, Tunno stayed calm and collected.

“He got up earlier this morning than I’ve ever seen him get up in his life,” Tunno’s father, Daryl, says.

Fellow freshman Kelsey Pryze began preparing for Saturday about a month ago, making lists and packing boxes early to make sure she’d be ready for the move into her dorm. Her preparation paid off, making the move “fairly painless” for her and her family.

Despite how smoothly the packing and unpacking process went, Pryze says she can’t help but feel a little nervous for the semester.

“It’s kind of hard for me to wrap my head around,” Pryze says. “It’s so different from all my other years of school, and from anything else I’ve done.”

The waves of students moving in didn’t just create work for college kids and their families. State College U-Haul manager Greg Stoicheff says student move-in weekend can cause “mass confusion at any time” at the lot where families drop off their empty trucks.

“I guess it’s comparable to student move-out weekend, but it’s much more unpredictable,” he says. “I can look at out the window at any time and suddenly have five trucks all pulling in at the same time.”

He says in order to help make this weekend less stressful, families using U-Haul trucks or similar services should be sure to carefully follow the agreements they signed when they rented their trucks. One of the most common, and easily fixable, issue is when people don’t return the truck with the same amount of gas they rented it with.

Despite the sheer number of trucks and cars packed to the brim with anxious students and their belongings, Dave Snyder says everything progressed very smoothly while he helped his daughter Cindy move in to her dorm.

“I was expecting traffic to be blocked all the way to bottom of University Drive and College Avenue – but there was almost none,” Snyder says. “All in all, this was a piece of cake.”

Looking around his dorm room, Tunno’s mother Susan says any feelings of sadness are overcome by her pride and excitement for her son. Her husband adds that having both their sons up at Penn State makes them more excited than ever to come up for home football games.

Pryze, though nervous, says she can’t wait to start her classes and her new life as a college student.

“This is Penn State,” she says, “and that means it’s the best.”

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