Amber Burg's Blog

At any moment during the day students enjoy the luscious campus green space, wait in crowded lines in the cafeteria, or linger in dorm hallways with friends. Even at night students pack into lounges or curled up in the Learning Center with a textbook in their lap and a highlighter in hand. Students linger everywhere on campus, except on weekends.

Colleges known to be low on student bodies during weekends are called suitcase campuses. Meaning students never really unpack their belongs because they plan on returning home soon enough. Morningside could be considered to be half of a suitcase campus because students do not go home every weekend but every two or three weeks campus goes dead quiet.

According to the New York Times, “52% of freshmen that attend a four-year public college live within 50 miles of home.”At Morningside, the case is no different. Most students live within a hour drive. The Morningside College Fact Book states that in 2012 37 of the new students were from Sioux City. Spread across Iowa, excluding the 37 from Sioux City, are 120 students. Home is not that far away for some students that attend Morningside.

How deserted campus becomes on weekends depends on the weekend. If few activities are going on, college resembles the emptiness of a desert as a tumbleweed blows across it.

Saturday mornings on campus in the cafeteria crowds of freshly woken-up college students standing, some half asleep and others wide-eyed and perky, stand in line for brunch. Labor Day Weekend was the exact opposite. The grey tables surrounded by maroon and yellow chairs in their usually chaotic rows were empty. Lines that normally hold ten to twenty students hold just one or two people. Brunch lines are a breeze.

The room itself, quiet. Quiet enough that if a pen drops it would be heard two tables down. People can hear conversations from across the length of the cafeteria.

Students call out to one another from the high tables colored with sunlight from the windows to the tables and booths that surrounds the flat-screened televisions.

In the dorms the change is more noticeable. The long halls of Dimmitt, usually bustling with young freshman excited about something, are empty and silent. No music blares. No doors slam shut or creak open. There is just rows of silent shut grey doors and recently un-walked on grey carpet.

In the dorms at night, RAs roam the hallways on rounds. It’s an easy night for them. No one is there to create chaos and mischief. The most students on one hall is three.

For the students that go home, their journey starts with Friday afternoon or in the evening for some. They walk to their vehicle, some struggling with overstuffed duffel bags around their shoulders, laundry baskets filled to the brim with dirty worn clothes, and a backpack stuffed with textbooks thrown on their back. They throw their swollen duffel bag in the backseat along with other various things and climb into the front seat to shove the key into the ignition. The car comes to life with the purr of the engine and thus beginning their familiar drive back home.

Some students wonder why others go home so often. For some like Brittany Rupp, a junior, it’s to see their younger siblings at home. She has a 2-year-old blonde haired little sister who is just learning how to talk and still wobbles slightly when she walks. Along with Jade, the little two-year-old, Rupp has another sister who just reached Junior High and a brother who attends high school. Being two hours away she misses the little things of their lives, like her baby sister learning to talk or her brother’s band concert.

Brittany receives messages, pictures, and phone calls keeping her up-to-date on the family activities and developments but nothing beats the drive home down I-29 in her red pickup truck to a fluffy white Siberian Husky that greets her at the door along with a blonde haired toddler who still has a hard time saying her name.

Others go home because a big brown Lab with eyes the color of deep chocolate brown is waiting at the door with their tail wagging. If a person happens to walk into Jennifer Olinde’s dorm room at college they will find pictures of her dog, that she’s had since he was a pup, plastered over the off-white colored walls near her bed.

Olinde receives messages from her mom full of picture of her mischief dog and even phone calls updating her on how much trouble he got into recently.

Staying on campus every weekend just isn’t possible for some students. Colleges hate receiving the label of suitcase campus because it gives them a bad image. However, big parts of students’ lives don’t live on campus. They live miles away sleeping in a wooden crib or curled up resting in dog bed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/education/edlife/at-suitcase-schools-around-the-country-friday-means-its-time-to-leave.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

https://my.morningside.edu/assets/job_search/2012_13_FactBook.pdf

Brittany Rupp  blr002@morningside.edu

Jennifer Olinde  jlo003@morningside.edu

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 14th, 2014 at 5:59 pm and is filed under Journalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.