The Best:

1. You get to share your new home with them. You have spent the past semester – or years – making college your new home. It starts off as your home away from home and at some random point in time it turns into your real home. When your parents visit, you get to show them the place you have made your home. You show them where you sleep, where you eat, where your classes are, your favorite buildings, and the shortcuts you use to take to class.

2. Shopping!!! Your parents have missed you and in order to show you how much, they buy you stuff. It’s a parent’s nature to provide things for their child. Since they have been away from their child for so long, all the giving and shopping occurs during parents weekend. This means a trip to the campus bookstore, downtown shops, and the mall.

3. R.E.A.L. F.O.O.D. College has its ups and downs. One of its downs is the food. Even if your school has the best dining hall food around, its still dining hall food. Your parents will either bring you food from home (real bagels if they really love you) or they take you out to eat at your favorite restaurant around campus that you don’t have the budget to splurge on every day. If you’re lucky they will stock your dorm room mini fridge with homemade specialties and favorites.

4. Staying in a hotel. Your parents can’t fit into your dorm room twin XL bed, so they get a hotel room for the weekend. This means you are coming with them! You get to shower in a clean bathroom and jump into a big fluffy bed and have the best sleep of your life. It also gives you a chance to get away from campus for the night and relax.

5. Gossip. Your parents share with you everything you have missed since school started. What stores shut down, which malls were built, who already dropped out of college, who got divorced, who had a baby, and who’s getting married! You have been in your own bubble at school for the passed few months; your parents provide information about the outside world since you’ve been gone.

The Worst:

6. Left all alone. Parents weekend sucks when your parents don’t actually attend. You watch campus fill up with students and theyre parents while you sit alone in your room. You get to meet your friends’ parents and might even get an invite to the family dinner, but it only makes you wish your parents were there.

7. Social blackout. Parents weekend means frats can’t have parties in their houses and campus police are stricter with shutting down parties. For the people not staying in the hotel with their parents, finding a fun party may be hard.

8. Must clean everything. Your room is a mess, your dirty laundry is covering your floor, you have shot glasses everywhere, and your parents come TOMORROW. This means you have to spend all night, even all week, tidying up your room, doing many loads of laundry, and hiding all alcohol and party paraphernalia. Your room has to be spotless for the inevitable room visits when your parents first arrive. (TIP for next year: if you run out of time, throw everything in a garbage bag and shove it in your closet).

9. It’s just a tease. Your parents visit for the weekend, but then they leave and you stay at school. Parents weekend acts as a tease for Thanksgiving break. You get a feel of home when they come, but when they leave you can’t go back with them. There is still a whole month before you can happily return home.

10. Embarrassing moments. Parents fill up campus, which means they are bound to embarrass you countless times. Whether they bring up college boy discussions, yell at you in front of everyone, get drunk at the football pregame, or hug you in public for minutes at a time because they miss you so, so much.