The All-Nighter I’ll Never Forget

The clock approached midnight, and there was still no sign of my roommate. Soon it was 1 AM, then 2, and I was wondering if she would ever come back. I didn’t really have cause to worry, considering that she was in the city with her parents, and normally I wouldn’t feel the need to stay awake until the wee hours of the morning for her to get back, but tonight was different. It was Life Story Night.

Yes, like good Wheaton students, my roommate, our future triple roommate, and I had scheduled a night early in the second semester to share our life stories with each other. Despite living and working together for months, we each had a whole nineteen years of background that none of the others knew much about.

So it was settled- on a Saturday night in March we committed to sacrifice sleep and sanity and recount the good, the bad, and the ugly of our pasts. When my roommate rolled in around 2:15, I decided to get the show on the road by volunteering to share first. I didn’t quite know what to expect, but as we sat in a circle on the dorm room floor, stories about my childhood, sickness and loss in my family, my awkward middle school years, the joys and disappointments of my athletic career, my year so far at Wheaton, my passions and dreams for the future, and my spiritual life poured out of me.

By the time I finally brought the story up to date, I was shocked to look down at my phone and realize that an hour had passed since I started. I shared things that I rarely, if ever, had shared before, and experienced the beauty of unadulterated listening. My other two friends told the stories of their lives in similar fashion, and were likewise punctuated with a range of emotions from tears to laughter.

At five in the morning, it was finished. While some people in the dorm were waking up for early church, we shut our blinds to the sunrise and went to bed. To the average onlooker, nothing different would meet the eye except for maybe drooping eyelids and smudged mascara. On the outside, there was no change. But I see this as the turning point of my freshman year for three reasons:

I had been vulnerable in ways that I never had before. For the first time, I was brutally honest with myself and my friends and didn’t try to hide the parts of my life that I was ashamed of.

I knew my friends on a deeper level. We had always had fun together, but now I was able to see how their pasts, their upbringings, and their struggles shaped their beautiful and different personalities.

I had found friends for life. I knew that the people I now studied with, ate with, watched movies with, and lived with would one day be the people I told my kids about, the ones who would celebrate my life’s joys and mourn its losses, and the ones who would look back on that one late night our freshman year when we had stayed up past reason and smile. These girls have become my encouragers, my prayer warriors, and my best friends. That night, listening to the birds chirp their morning song when I finally crawled into bed, I smiled because I knew that I had just pulled an all-nighter I would never forget.

Homeschooler in the Real World

Emma Folts, a sophomore at Wheaton College, shares her experience about her transition into college and how homeschool has both helped and hindered her.
How has your homeschool experience benefitted you, especially in your transition into college?
I think the one thing that homeschooling did that was really helpful as I entered college was that it taught me time management. As a homeschooler I had the same freedom as a college student has to put things off during the day and go see a friend instead. Since I had that experience, I knew the cost of that.
Also, personal responsibility and accountability with assignments. I feel like a lot of the other students had more expectations for gentler grading and that the professor would give them retakes or extensions, but that wasn’t something that ever happened to me in school. That learning curve wasn’t added because I never had it the other way. I think another thing was that because I was homeschooled, I was familiar with the format of teaching and then studying on my own.
Did you see any issues with your transition socially?
I think that homeschooling had two ramifications for me socially. One was helpful, one was hurtful.
It was really helpful because as a homeschooler, I had spent a lot of time realizing and developing who I was as a person and learning to recognize people who were being themselves, and those were the people I sought out as friends. Friendship as a homeschooler takes a lot more investment. I knew I was choosier with my friends which made me a lot less anxious and a lot more content.
The only real negative impact of the social bit was that I was really used to getting to choose the time I got to spend with people. As a homeschooler I spent a lot of time with people, but that time was controlled by me. As a college student, I found that you can’t really control the time you spend with people and alone time is not really available. Learning to deal with that was a lot harder than anticipated.
Any last comments on homeschool and how it has affected your college experience?
I think homeschooling is really helpful, however it does take a slightly increased amount of advocacy with your peers when you’re entering into college. I think a lot of people come in with certain assumptions about homeschool, especially students. You’re going to get a lot of, ‘oh my gosh, you don’t seem like a homeschooled person!’ [You can’t] take that too personally and explain your experience so that friends can understand it’s an important piece of you, though it might not look like the homeschooling that they’ve seen.
My encouragement to anyone who is a homeschooler transitioning into college is to realize the benefit that you have having been homeschooled, and to realize that the bit of advocacy and explaining that you need to do with your peers is totally normal and that it’s not a big deal. Once they understand your experience, it’s not something I’ve experienced being looked down on for.