When Does BU Start to Feel Like Home?

We’d like to think it’s move-in day, but campus truly becomes ours when we least expect it.

By Zahra Kazmi

Photo by Rykken Vivekenand

For most people, BU doesn’t automatically feel like home after move-in day, nor does it begin to feel like home after the forced icebreakers you endure during orientation week. You still walk around finishing unpacking your suitcases, building your vanity, and waiting to hang that last poster. But even then, a couple of months later, it still feels like you’re a visitor, discovering new spots on campus, building a routine, trying to figure out how you fit in the big city. Home doesn't announce itself; it doesn't happen in a moment of realization; it creeps in until the word itself stops having one clear answer.

It's never really the big stuff that does it either. You'd think it would be your first BU Hockey game or your first club application, but that's not usually how it goes. It's smaller than that, almost the things that feel insignificant. It's taking the same staircase every week in Cummington Mall without looking at the steps because your legs already know them. It’s sitting at the same table in GSU with your friends every Thursday. It's walking down Comm. Ave. and not noticing the view anymore, not because it stopped being nice, but because you stopped needing to look.

It isn’t just seen in the environment; it’s seen in the community you build. For that first year, you find yourself comparing every new friend to the hometown friends you've had for years, comparing the Star Market by your dorm to the supermarket you grew up going to. But little by little, you find familiarity in the steps, and you build routine. There's an intricate dance between longing for the next break, finally going home, reuniting with your hometown friends, sleeping in your own bed, and then, somewhere along the school year, aching to get back to the opposite. You find yourself wishing summer would end a little sooner, missing your roommate and college friends, craving that underground hotpot spot you go to every weekend, just wanting to be back on campus again. 

The switch usually happens without us realising it, and sometimes it takes someone else pointing it out before you even notice: “I was talking to my mom this summer, and I was referring to how I left my speaker in Boston, and I accidentally said ‘I left it at home.’ I didn't even catch on to what I was saying until my mom called me out on it,” said Affan Daddan (CAS '29) when asked if BU feels like home. He explained that, for him, the familiarity and comfort that came from his dorm window built his attachment. He found himself missing the view and realized those little moments were what solidified his connection to BU. 

And somewhere in the middle of all that repetition, without one specific day marking it, BU quietly stops being somewhere you're staying and starts being somewhere you're from. There isn’t a specific answer; it's more like everything that used to make a place feel foreign just slowly stops happening. The comparing stops, the overthinking subsides, the discomfort fades, and you settle into home.