Examining the college experience on a commuter campus
Anyone who spends a significant amount of time on Northern Essex Community College’s Haverhill campus is likely to acknowledge it is a place where people are made to feel welcome.
Where does this sense of welcoming acceptance come from? Does it stem from a legitimately established sense of community?
Being a commuter school makes it difficult for an academic establishment to foster any sort of long-lasting personal identity let alone a policy on social connectivity.
Maybe this favorable reception felt in the hallways stems not from an established sense of community but rather an ecosystem defined by the campus as a physical place, where a shifting mass of unconnected commuters all inhabit the same space with myriad academic agendas and thus do not share enough in common to create a familiar social network.
What this sort of system can result in is a place where the regularities of polite exchange are limited to such kinds found in any random public venue where large groups of people inhabit space.
When the long-awaited day of high school graduation comes to fruition some people may experience a Stockholm syndrome adjacent biproduct. You’ve been forced to collaborate with people not of your choosing for such an extended amount of time that your raw proximity to them over time creates a kind of empathy for people you may have even had disdain for in the past.
At a commuter school like our own we are not placed under the same kind of stipulations.
We are each showing up at often very different times to pursue goals that are fundamentally unique to each individual in attendance.
The time for socializing in this place is confined to small sets of circumstance.
There are no gaps to yap in unless you go out of your way to advance a conversation with a peer in the hurried moments between classes or from class to parking lot and that kind of initiation is only present in a percentile of spontaneous pupils.
That being said; friends can be made, and socializing can be had, but in this academic ecosystem of our humble commutersphere how do we go about fostering meaningful social connections in accordance with the limitations of our environment and do we even want to?
This is not a phenomenon unique to Northern Essex. Commuter schools at large plot ways to create a sense of community for the academic diaspora in their charge by means of clubs and student centers.
Some of these spaces are ghost towns while others provide a space for peers to bond while catching up on assignments and the like.
Under The Observer’s Campus Life section this semester we will put a magnifying lens to these questions through meaningful feedback from individual students and staff and maybe get to know each other a little better in the process.
We will aim to uncover what lays in the unconscious consensus of our campus, dig deeper into the social shockwave of the COVID-19 pandemic that is still rippling throughout every community and the arresting modern-day landscape of social media in relation to social connection all while keeping our finger on the pulse of “campus life” to see if it’s still beating.
Get in touch with me, I would love to hear your thoughts about campus life or your individual experience here Let’s explore the current state of things and discuss its evolving future. Email me at observer@necc.mass.edu.
