Walking around the Penn State campus on Monday, freshman Hannah Santos almost couldn’t believe where she was.
She’d been away from home before, sure, but never for very long. Even as Santos walked between her first college classes, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d be leaving campus at the end of the day.
“It still feels kind of surreal to finally be here,” Santos says. “I don’t know how to describe it. It almost doesn’t feel like I’m actually in college yet.”
But Santos and thousands of other students were back in force for the start of the fall 2015 semester, filling campus and downtown State College with a familiar sense of bustling energy.
For many students, like sophomore Blake Dickerson, returning to State College means a reunion with friends and a return to the demands of college life. Even though Dickerson will face some academic challenges as he takes a full 18 credit course load, he’s still excited to be back on campus.
“Penn State is my home away from home,” he says. “It just feels really good to be here.”
But the students aren’t the only ones who will have more work to do. Associate professor of media studies Matt Jordan will have some new challenges to tackle as he teaches two new classes for the first time.
Jordan says he always enjoys working with his colleagues and getting to know a new group of students, but that he feels conflicting emotions as a new semester gets underway.
“It’s a combination of excitement and depression,” Jordan says. “Excitement for the new semester, and depression that I didn’t accomplish nearly as much work as I would’ve liked over the summer.”
Penn State senior Kayla Tompkins also felt some conflicting emotions as she entered the home stretch of her college career on Monday.
She jokes that she and her fellow seniors are now “the top dogs” of the university, and she laughs as she recalls how nervous she was when she first came to Penn State four years ago.
But Tompkins is also simultaneously excited and nervous about the prospect of graduating and joining the workforce. The art education major has a plan in place to begin student teaching next fall, but says she’ll still miss “some of the best years of [her] life” at Penn State.
“It’s sad in a way, but it’s also really exciting,” Tompkins says. “This will be a year to remember.”
