For anyone who knows me well, they know how much I love my family. It’s an undeniable fact that the people I miss while I’m at school are my parents and four younger siblings. I love our phone calls, facetimes, Snapchats, and random texting conversations, but something about not actually being there kind of sucks.

Sometimes I feel like I come home after six, seven, maybe eight weeks of school and feel like I have missed out on a lifetime. There are new memories, inside jokes, friends, girlfriends, everything. The saddest thing is when I feel like things are changing and I’m not there to see them happen. A lot of the time it hits me that being nearly 800 miles away changes things between me and people at home whether I want them to or not.

My brother Jack is currently a senior in high school. As he looked into schools, he always made a big deal about how he refused to go East. It always kind of made me sad when he would say this, and I would constantly make jabs, asking why he didn’t want to go to school near me.

Hearing that he had somehow changed his mind made me ecstatic. I called him immediately and the entire phone call we talked about how far away his school is going to be from mine and how long a train/car ride would take. Due to the fact that he is going to this school for hockey, we were already planning out how I could visit for hockey games and that, once the season was over, hopefully, he could come down to Villanova.

To say that I am beyond excited to be on the same coast, same time zone, and in the same general vicinity of the world as my brother is an understatement. I can’t wait to be able to visit him, watch his hockey games, and be his number one fan in all things prep-school related.