Trying to schedule a family visit for Homecoming and Family Weekend as an out-of-state college student can feel like a Herculean effort.
Often scheduled for the middle of the fall semester — when the intensity of assignments and tests is kicked up in frequency and difficulty — students whose families live outside of Colorado are also expected to coordinate across time zones and states in order to capitalize on family-themed events that only occur once a year. If this chaos can be overcome and a Family Weekend visit is scheduled, unequal demand is placed upon students to plan their assignments out far ahead and front load their work in order to help with travel to and from Denver International Airport — a nightmare in and of itself — in time to pick up family or make it back before work or classes.
But scheduling isn’t the only issue: Flights and hotels are becoming more expensive by the day, and having family stay in an already-crowded apartment or dorm is a no-go for a peaceful, conflict-free visit.
The headache that comes with aligning the calendars of an entire family to make an enjoyable, engaging trip possible is enough to deter many families’ college visits during the school year, but it greatly intensifies with the pressure Homecoming brings to town every year. In the same 72-hour window, parents, siblings and Colorado State University alumni flocks to campus, pushing every stressor imaginable to unfathomable degrees and somehow still managing to add more.
Restaurants quickly hit capacity and stay that way all weekend. Any student who’s tried the town-tour rigamarole knows it’s difficult to show the charm of Old Town when 100 other families are trying to recreate the same experience.
While trying to spend precious time with family members who live hundreds or thousands of miles away, school doesn’t stop; it intensifies. If you step away — even if only for a few hours — to complete your required assignments, guilt quickly seeps in as you realize you have sacrificed limited time with your closest relatives to do a discussion post.
Once the weekend is over and everyone has gone home, good memories have certainly been made. But the arguments and frustration of trying to reconcile massive travel bill and the stress of living so far apart for months on end quickly overshadows the fun dinners or celebrations at the football game.
Finally, once you think you’re done and can relax, there’s still one more assignment due at 11:59 p.m. that was forgotten.
Were the moments spent with family worth it? Was the cost worth spending? Bickering worth enduring?
Of course it was. It’s a gift to get to see family members as an out-of-state student. More than a football game, 5K or bonfire lighting, what makes the visit worth it is your family bringing a bit of the childhood you left behind into an environment that lacks it.
Does that visit need to happen for over 30,000 students all on the same weekend? Absolutely not.
Visits from family improve when they don’t happen over Homecoming and Family Weekend. The long list of official activities is fun, but they’re not worth the stress of ruining a chance to see your family. At the end of the day, the people who come to do the activities are what make them matter, not the other way around.
There is no way to avoid all the stress that accompanies family coming to visit a college town. Just as with any family outing, there’s bound to be some turbulence. Disagreements on where to eat dinner or comments about apartment tidiness, however, are always more manageable when you know you’ve picked the least stress-inducing and financially burdensome weekend possible for them to happen.
The best way to avoid this commercialized stress is to pick the time that works best for your family. If that means you’ll be studying at Alley Cat during the Homecoming football game so you can enjoy a weekend with your family a month later, then throw the official university itinerary to the side and write your own. A family visit should be coordinated by the people for whom it matters most.
The best parts of Fort Collins will be here no matter the weekend, and a hug from your loved ones is always meaningful, no matter the week in the semester. Make it the best weekend for you, not for CSU.
Reach Cait Mckinzie at letters@collegian.com or on social media @RMCollegian.
