If you’re looking for a post that tells you that I first encountered CMU on a campus visit day and fell in love at first sight, you’ve come to the wrong place. I grew up a 10 minute drive east of CMU, so to be honest, I can’t even recall the first time I laid eyes on CMU’s campus. Thanks to countless church picnics, sports camps, and the CMU CastleChristmas concerts that I attended on the campus as a child, I felt at home by the time I went to visit the campus as a prospective student, let alone my first day of school as a student.

So what about those of you who didn’t grow up within a stone’s throw of the castle? Or what about those of you who aren’t familiar with the campus? Well, no matter where you go to university, you’re going to want it to feel like home. So if CMU is on your list of potential school’s, it’s best to become familiar with it and make it start feeling like home.

It doesn’t matter if you’re planning to come to CMU for one year or five years; your university experience will be infinitely better if the school you go to feels like home.

That obviously pertains to residence students who spend all of their hours on campus. But that also includes commuter students too. Having commuted to CMU for four years, I can say from experience that you’ll still spend most of your waking hours at the school.

visit CMU the Library

But making a university a home has to do with more than just finding a place you like to be. You should also feel at home in the classroom and with what you are studying.

Part of that will come with getting used to university classes, but part of that comes with choosing a program that is fit for you. There’s no better way to find out about what programs are offered at a school and what they’re like than by going there and talking to the people who teach the courses, and the people who are taking the courses. At a small university like CMU, that’s no issue, and you’ll get a great sense for what the programs are all about.

But often it is the people you become close with that make a place feel like home.

AlexSo how are you supposed to know who you are going to be spending your time with before your university experience starts? Well, for the most part you won’t. But visiting a campus and making connections with the people who are there before you even get there will help you start to create that circle of people that will be around you when you start attending university. Or at the very least, they will be the people who will get you settled in to find that group of people that will help you create a home at your university.

So why visit CMU? Well, you’ll get shown the school, and the residence buildings. You’ll learn about the programs offered, and what might fit for you as a student. You’ll probably even get to sit in on a class. You’ll definitely meet staff and students along the way too. Those all seem like pretty good ways to start turning CMU from a university into a home.

Jason Friesen is our lead blogger, and is in his final year of a Communications and Media degree at CMU.