SAWANT: Leaving campus is pivotal in reminding ourselves our world is bigger than Rutgers
Column: Sincerely Rue
When you step foot on campus for the first time ever, it feels like a huge, sprawling realm with no beginning and no end. So many places to see, so many places to be and, honestly, so many ways to get lost or take the wrong bus to strand you farther away from your destination.
But as time goes on and you get your routine down to a neat little sequence of events you know like the back of your hand, suddenly this world seems to shrink exponentially. The campus you once thought was a vast metropolis dwindles into a room with four walls closing in closer and closer as time goes on.
As interesting as Rutgers can be on any day, given that you are at the right place at the right time, it can otherwise grow quite boring. Seeing the same sights every day, taking the same route to your classes, your boring work shifts, it all somehow becomes too much yet not enough at the same time.
Especially since the majority of Rutgers students are either native New Jerseyans or commuter students (or both), the weekends especially can feel pretty dead with a good amount of the student body heading home. Suddenly, the buzzing metropolis withers into a sleepy hamlet with nothing to do but eat at a cafe or study the entire day.
Of course, if your friends stay or visit for the weekend it is not so bad, but even then, it can be boring, at least during the day (I will say, we are lucky that the nightlife is not so bad). There simply is not much to do on a college campus besides visiting the bookstore or sitting outside and studying or eating. Especially when it gets colder and snowy, the number of weekend activity options diminishes to a far sadder number. That only leaves one option to maintain at least a shred of zeal for life — leaving campus.
I believe some people underestimate just how therapeutic it can be to get off campus every once in a while. When I reply to friends that my plans for the weekend involve “going home” or “leaving campus” sometimes people ask me “why?” I do not know how to answer that question because I wonder “why not?” Getting away serves as almost a mental palette cleanser — like changing your bed sheets but for your brain.
Not that Rutgers is a terrible place or that it does not hold great memories that make my time on campus any less enriching, but stewing day after day in the same environment where you take classes, stress over exams, burn yourself out doing assignments and even toil away at work if you work for the University can be a lot. There is no clean boundary between school life and personal life.
You can argue that as a full-time student, school is your personal life. I recognize that it is a huge part of who you are for the time being since it takes up a lot of your time. Yes, school is important, but I refuse to believe that it is your entire being. You can prioritize school but still have a life, a core "you," outside of it.
Something I have found that helps reconnect me to myself after running the mundane cycle of studying, homework, exams and work is getting off campus for a bit with friends or visiting home. Even if you cannot necessarily visit home, taking a drive or an Uber outside and going to the mall, Topgolf, a library, a movie theater, a concert or really anywhere that is not campus is actually really refreshing.
Instead of going to a gym on campus, you can try visiting a gym just outside campus. If you need to grab groceries, try a ShopRite or Target rather than Kilmer’s Market on Livingston campus. If you have a relatively free weekend, take the train to the city and spend a day there.
It is a good way to mix up your routine and give yourself a change of scenery — not to mention, remind yourself that we live in a world much larger than the Rutgers campus.
As college students, we may exacerbate the scope of our anxieties and worries because, at the moment, our world is just school and work. The 10-page paper we have only two days to do, the exam for which we study so hard but retain nothing and a long work shift after a long day of classes pile up and seem like the worst things in the world. But for me at least, taking a break from it all and leaving campus has helped remind me that these worries are just one part of a multifaceted life — A little snippet of a much larger world.
Life may feel like it tends to freeze when we are surrounded by the things that make it feel so slow, but in reality, life goes on. It is good to get out and remind ourselves of that.
I think we are extremely lucky that our campus is as large as it is, but sometimes, it feels as small as the head of a pin. When it feels like that, it is always nice to know there are bigger things out there.
Rujuta Sawant is a Rutgers Business School junior majoring in business analytics and information technology and minoring in political science. Her column, "Sincerely Rue," runs on alternate Mondays.
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