Home Page

This post is from Grown and Flown.

by Leslie Zacks

I am one of the hundreds, perhaps thousands of people navigating around your college students as they stumble through the waning days of their fall semester. My husband is one of their professors and our family lives in a residential college for first years in a midwestern university. We are your student’s neighbors and sometimes their friends. We are parents ourselves, but we are not their parents.

Many students stay through the short fall break and Thanksgiving. It isn’t unusual for us to have a few stragglers over for a meal when the campus is quiet. But almost everyone leaves for the Christmas break.

For some of your kids, it is their first trip home after the frenetic drop-off at the beginning of the year. They are emotionally and physically exhausted from a long and intense few months here on campus, and they are ready to bust out. They’ve been through a lot — hopefully mostly good things — and they are just making a break for the door as fast as they can.

But a campus is still a living and breathing place, even when the students are gone. Just like your homes continue to operate when they are here with us. Every campus makes impassioned pleas to students with basic holiday departure reminders, but they are routinely ignored in the fog of finals and prolonged adolescence. We Campus Adults would like to partner with you, the Primary Adults in their lives, to ensure that some of this gets through.

9 things college students need to do before they leave campus for winter break

1. Implement some basic common-sense security.

Apparently, as much as 90% of our campus security team’s time is spent removing tape from the door locks that students put there so their doors don’t latch. Somehow, as bright as they are, students haven’t figured out how to avoid losing their keys.

On many campuses, this causes major security equipment malfunctions, especially once the students leave for extended periods. Stop doing this. Be a grownup. Lock your door, and don’t create a security risk for everyone else.

Put your room key in a safe place over break so that you can easily access your room when you return. Also, close your windows and store your bike in your room. If you have a car on campus that you aren’t driving home, be sure it’s locked and appropriately parked. Be a total genius by leaving a spare key on your desk. Just in case.

2. Be a total rock star and strip your bed.

Be honest- have you changed your sheets once all term? It’s ok — I’m not going to judge. Whether you are planning on taking three months’ worth of laundry home to your Primary Parent or not, it would be a great idea to leave your bed stripped and just let everything air out a bit. And if you happened to wash those sheets or simply replace them with new ones in the process, congratulations, big kid. That’s the first step in starting the next term off on the right foot.

3. For the love of God, please empty your trash.

Individual trash cans can render a residential college completely uninhabitable for the entire holiday break. I have had to unleash my beagle to sniff under doors to identify the location of an unemptied compost bin on Christmas Eve. Rid your room of trash before you abandon ship, PLEASE.

4. Put that thing away.

Be aware that the security team on your campus can access your room during the break if there is a safety issue. There are still people living on campus and various alarms can be triggered. You might want to think about that before you leave anything sensitive and embarrassing lying around your room that you wouldn’t want your mother to see.

Our campus security chief shared several stories about having to access students’ rooms during the break for any number of reasons, and trust me — nobody wants to see what you’re into if they don’t have to. You have closets and drawers. Use them.

5. Your lava lamp and your monitor don’t need you.

You’ve come to college to figure out how to save the world. How about starting with saving a little energy while you’re away? There is no reason why your electronics need to stay powered up while you’re away for three weeks. Please hit those lights and pull every plug.

To read the rest of the article, click here.