As a student from Connecticut I'm a bit of an oddity at the University of Arizona. It's a public school so most of its students are from Arizona, and it's weird to have to explain the local lingo to people here when I talk to them, telling them that "UConn" means "the University of Connecticut" and when I talk about "Bristol" I mean the Bristol that's ten minutes away from Terryville--not Bristol, England.

Still, there are a lot of kids from other places here. There's a fairly large group from California--especially southern California, places like Orange County, Fresno, and San Diego. I've met kids in my classes from Seattle, Salt Lake City, and Colorado. My roommate is from a suburb outside Chicago, and he's not the only one.

So far though I've only heard rumors of other UofA students from Connecticut. It doesn't add up when you think about it. You can't get much farther from Connecticut without leaving the continental United States than Tucson (roughly 2800 miles apart). A look at where most of my graduating class decided to go explains why--more than half of them went to schools in Connecticut, and all but four of them decided to stay within the the confines of New England (one went to New Jersey, another to Tennessee, another to Florida, and a fourth is at an Air Force base in Texas).

I don't think there's anything wrong with that. It's hard to be so far from home, and I don't blame anyone for wanting to be close to friends and family.

But what was all this hype about graduating high school for then? All these kids who made such a big deal about graduating, about leaving Terryville, about how this is the last time we're all going to be together, only to pack up and drive two hours (give or take) down the road to UConn or New Haven. Kinda goes against the grain of what it means to be finally leaving high school behind you.

The UofA reminds me of UConn in that respect. A lot of kids here are from nearby cities and towns like Scottsdale, Phoenix, and Tucson itself.

The people from Phoenix especially remind me of the situation back home. Phoenix is about two hours from the UofA in the same way UConn is two hours from Terryville, and a lot of graduates from high schools in Phoenix are going to college here. They brought their bed sheets, their books, their clothes, their toothbrushes, and all their other belongings just like everyone else--but they also brought their friends, their enemies (whether they wanted to or not, they all ended up here), their ex's, their loves, their hatreds, their grudges, their drama, and their own sets of issues. A whole slew of problems that grew and festered in their high school social scenes have been transplanted to their new college life.

A lot of the kids from Phoenix are not handling it well. They miss the people they left behind. They miss their homes, even though those homes are nowhere near as far away as the homes my roommate and I departed from. They miss the lives they use to lead. Some of them are depressed. Some of them are thinking about dropping out already.

And all this creates the phenomenon I was a witness to this Labor Day weekend: almost everyone from Phoenix went back home. It's only a day longer than the regular weekend, but they all took the opportunity to escape college, even for a little while. It was an evacuation on the scale of an exodus.

What does this say about kids today, who are scared of leaving home, and once they do try to find any way they can to get back to it? And what does this say about people like me, who are literally thousands of miles away, who can't go home on long weekends, and who won't see home again until Christmas?

I can't draw any conclusions from it at the moment. But the Phoenix Exodus leaves all of us--both the college kids and the high school kids looking at colleges to go to once they graduate--something to think about.