Friend Me: Mixing Home Life and the New World of ASP

By MADI CLEMENT

Rising high school seniors came to this summer’s Advanced Studies Program from all over New Hampshire, leaving friends and family behind. They packed up bags and drove sometimes for hours to reach the campus in the woods, the

St. Paul’s Advanced Studies Program (ASP). We came for various reasons, and for those reasons we made the choice to spend the summer in a classroom setting. We have developed a form of community, with houses, new families, and new friends. The question is, should the students of ASP spend time online talking to friends from home, or living in the moment at ASP? 

The first opportunity for friend visits came on Wednesday, June 27, 2012. Many people’s friends and family flooded the ASP campus in search of tours and friendly conversation. ASP engineering student Emma Sosa commented about seeing her friends for the first time since the summer started. “I felt a little empty when they left. This isn’t home for me and seeing them made me miss the parts that form my daily routine.” Sosa wasn’t alone in her feelings about being reminded of home. World Religions student Evan Howard observed that when he saw his mother and friends “I thought of home, I didn’t necessarily miss it, but I thought about it.”

Similarly, people on campus have started spending more time on social media sites, fearing losing contact with the people at home. Their newsfeeds and Tumblrs and twitters are filled with the summer life of people back home. The posts often remind the students of what they left behind for the summer. In an attempt to simulate the real college experience, engineering student Jialin Shi states that “you can’t just tune the real world out. In a year or so all our friends will be moving on with us and we are going to keep in touch online.” This poses an interesting question about how students are treating the experience of ASP. Should the students try and keep touch, or since it’s such a short time period, should they try and get the most out of the experience by immersing themselves in the ASP bubble lifestyle?

Friends of mine who came to ASP in previous years warned me of the social media trap. They told me that you miss things when you get wrapped up in the outside world and all the friends you left at home. However I find myself disagreeing with them. Yet I also find myself disagreeing with the idea that people should feel compelled to keep their finger on the pulse of what is happening at home. I find that trying to keep in touch with everything at home, plus everything at ASP, is impossible. I think that things work best when people can balance talking to friends to keep in touch, and yet spend time with their new ASP friends.  

Not only are people just looking into life back home, they are keying in on the life here at ASP. Most of the classes and dorms have created some form of online group. When asked about the facebook groups, four Quest students Amanda Spiller, Madeline Doctor, Christina Moreland, and Maeve Dolan remarked that the groups detract from the overall experience. Doctor noted that “anything that gets posted on the ASP group is something they (the poster) could ask the interns.” Spiller even goes as far as to say that Facebook as a whole detracts from the time spent at ASP. “facebook makes you go to the past, past friends, past connections, where you should be living in the present."