My son is very shy and uncomfortable around new places/people/situations. One of his biggest criteria in choosing the colleges on his list was that they were either close to home, or easy to travel to home from them.
Two of the schools he applied to, the University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan University are within ten miles of home. Western Michigan University is only a couple of hours away by either car or Amtrack. Ball State University is about 3 hours away by car, and has one of the top ten architecture schools in the country.
He briefly considered Illinois, as well as Northwestern and Cornell. Illinois and Cornell were deemed to be too far away, as were Wisconsin, Cincinnati, Case Western, Kent State, Michigan Tech and Perdue. Anything on the coasts was out of the question for him. Northwestern was still seriously considered because he said it would be easy and cheap to catch a commuter train to downtown Chicago and then catch an Amtrack to home whenever he wanted to come home for a couple of days.
When he first started high school and wanted to go to football games he would ask me to drive him to the games. The first few times he sat next to me, glued at the hip. His friends would ask him to come sit with them, but he stayed with me. Then one game he went immediately and sat with his friends, and he was fine from there on out.
I expect college will be the same way if he goes away. He will come home for a lot of weekends initially, then he will stop coming home very often, and that will be the sign that he is comfortable and happy with his new situation. <i></i>
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