Parents embrace a rite of passage as they drop off students with linens, posters and hopes for a great academic year
For Northeastern University parents, dropping a child off at college is its own rite of passage, whether it is their first student or the last to leave home.
Moving daughter Rory into the East Village residence hall was a quick turnaround for Ashley Lang of Huntsville, Alabama, since she had to fly home Thursday to get Rory’s twin brother off to a college in Indiana.
The twins are the eldest of her three children.
“It’s hard losing two at the same time,” Lang said, but added that she knows Rory made the right decision in coming to Northeastern, citing the co-op and Dialogue of the Civilization program.
“She’s so excited about the international opportunities, so this is definitely the right place for her,” Lang said.
Lang is familiar with Boston, having gone to graduate school in the city, and she has friends in the area.
Packing for college meant ordering from Amazon and shipping the boxes to a friend who lives in Woburn, where they shopped for extras. “We hit up Target really hard,” Lang said.
Delane Clark of Denver, North Carolina, whose daughter Mabel is a first-year student, also said that Boston has a familiar feel, thanks to previous visits to see friends and go to Red Sox games.
“So it feels, weirdly enough, very at home,” Clark says. Another daughter is also in college, but just an hour and half away from home in North Carolina.
Clark and her daughter held shopping bags with pillows but said their work furnishing the residence hall bedroom was nearly done.
“I feel like I lucked out because Mabel is more of a minimalist, so she doesn’t really need a lot of stuff, but there are necessities,” Clark said.
“One of the biggest things we’ve thought about is, once the weather turns cold, getting the right clothes. North Carolina was cold in January, February, March, but not like here.”
Luckily her daughter likes colder temperatures, Clark said.
She said her hopes for Mabel are that she “really embraces the academics at Northeastern, meeting new people and exploring the city of Boston and beyond.”
Moving into Northeastern was a family affair for first-year student Hajar Abouyoussef of Quincy.
Accompanying her were her mother, Fatima Amatoul; father, Zakaria Abouyoussef; and sisters Ayah, a junior at Boston University, and Hafsa, an eighth grader.
“We’re going to be alone, with one left. She’s going to be the spoiled one now,” Zakaria Abouyoussef said.
“It’s a little bit hard, the first day,” Amatoul said.
Ayah Abouyoussef had words of advice for her younger sister. “She’s going to be surrounded by people her age. It’s a new environment. It will take time,” she said, but her younger sister at Northeastern will soon get used to how things work.
John and Marcy Almeida of Danvers have only one more week before they are empty nesters, at least part-time.
They dropped off their second and youngest child, Melinda, at East Village residence hall and were getting ready to go home to help their son pack up for Framingham State.
While their son doesn’t seem to care much about what his college room looks like, their daughter is more into decor, like a bed ruffle and posters, the Almeidas say.
The couple has been so busy with all the college preparations this week that John Almeida said he hasn’t had time to think about what it will be like with both children out of the house.
The thought is daunting, Marcy Almeida said.
Editor’s Picks
She said she looks forward to her daughter making new friends at Northeastern in Boston. “She has a lot of friends going to Northeastern, but they are all going to different campuses.”
“Academically, I hope she connects with her classes and things go well that way,” John Almeida said.
Like other parents of first-year students, the Almeidas said the move-in process was smooth and pain-free thanks to the movers working for the university.
The movers even grabbed his ice skates, they were so efficient, John Almeida said.
A few blocks away, on Columbus Avenue, John Grogan of Weston, Connecticut, helped his son, second-year student Patrick Grogan, push a bin filled with bags across the street to an apartment.
“We parked in the garage and just took all the stuff out of the car,” John Grogan said.
Patrick, who spent his first semester in Rome and second semester in Boston, is the third of four children to head off to college.
“The fourth and final was last week, and that was really hard,” John Grogan says.
But he says he doesn’t consider himself an empty nester when the family will be together for Thanksgiving and holiday breaks.
Asked for his hopes for Patrick this school year, John Grogan said: “Just a great experience. Figuring out what he wants to major in, the kind of job he likes. And having fun.”
