Where’s Home?” Just Down the Road

“I didn’t want to go to St. Lawrence because I lived in Canton, so I fought that for a while,” says Laura Wells ’23. Despite her ambivalence to attend college in her hometown, Laura eventually caved in. She liked SLU too much.  

Camaraderie rings through the laughter and chatter of the SLU Women’s Lacrosse team as they return to campus from an away game. Wells and Glasgow sit side-by-side in the back of the bus. Teammates sip on Starbucks drinks while familiar sights of farmland and rural living line the terrain as the bus trudges closer to Canton.  

“I would have the same take,” nods Paige Glasgow ’23, who is native to Canton, too. “I found it hard even looking at other schools, knowing that St. Lawrence’s campus was prettier.”  

Assistant Director of Admissions Brianna Larrabee ’22 is also from Canton. She sips on an iced coffee in the caribou coffee portion of the Brewer Bookstore. Larrabee is well versed in the ambivalence that Canton students feel towards staying in their hometown to attend college. Not only did she attend SLU after living in Canton, but Larrabee also works with prospective students from the St. Lawrence county region.   

“There was a stigma to not go to SLU,” she admits. “Because from the high school perspective, it felt like if you go to school in the North Country, you’ll never get out of the North Country.”  

The Larrabee family has a deeply rooted connection to St. Lawrence. Larrabee is a third-generation SLU student, with her grandmother graduating in ’64 and her parents in ’97. Her parents met in their First-Year Program and went on to get married in the chapel the summer after they graduated. Additionally, Larrabee has three sisters who attend SLU and are in the classes of ’20, ’25, and ’27.   

“It’s this fine line of us all having our own different experiences, but we also joke that we’re slowly taking over SLU,” Larrabee says.  

Having lived in Canton since third grade, Camryn Sipher ’26 planned to attend college somewhere new. “When I looked at other colleges, St. Lawrence was always in the back of my mind,” recalls Sipher. “I wanted to go somewhere else but kept comparing everything to St. Lawrence, and nothing seemed better to me.”   

Sipher sits in the window seat of the same bus that Laura and Paige are on, though she is seated at the very front. She nearly whispers to avoid disrupting the napping or studying of neighboring teammates.  

Despite feeling apprehensive about staying in Canton, each of these women eventually found their way back to SLU. Attending college closer to home is on the rise, as proven by research by the Higher Education Research Institute, which states that 56 percent of public four-year college students attend a school that is less than an hour away from home.  

During her time at SLU, Larrabee remembers being able to feel like a normal student while also enjoying the benefits of having her house nearby. “Sometimes I’d go home if I really needed to just be off campus, to either do some work or decompress,” Larrabee says. “So I had the convenience of going to my family when I needed that, rather than having to go to friends or different resources on campus.”  

In her work with applicants from St. Lawrence County, Larrabee finds that many local kids feel hesitant to stay in the area for college. “They’re kind of like, oh, I don’t know, SLU is a great option, but I just don’t love that it’s in Canton,” Larrabee observes. “So I get to talk to them about how I was in that same boat, and then it didn’t really feel like I was in Canton when I was a St. Lawrence student.”   

Larrabee enjoys connecting with local applicants and using her personal experience to help with their decision on whether or not to attend SLU. “It reminds me a lot of when I was in high school, and I was on the fence about what to do,” she adds. “If I had someone to talk to about that experience, that wasn’t a family member, I might have gotten to a decision quicker.”  

Sipher also enjoys how close her house is to SLU. Although initially planning to keep her college and home life separate, Camryn now enjoys being able to stop by her house to do laundry, see her puppy, or just stay the night in her own bed. “I like it because I have the opportunity of making SLU as far or as close to home as I want,” she adds.  

Being closer to home is often very beneficial in minimizing feelings of homesickness at college. Research conducted by Shirley Fisher for her book “Homesickness, Cognition, and Health” found that the further first-year university students lived from home, the more likely they were to experience homesickness. “Homesickness can have symptoms that are similar to depression, such as frequent crying, sleeping problems, difficulty concentrating, and withdrawal from society,” reports WebMD.  

Back on the bus, Wells and Glasgow consider the challenges they face as SLU students from Canton.  

“I feel like, if anything, there are…”  
“Advantages,” Wells says, innocently interrupting Glasgow.  
“Yeah, there are advantages,” finishes Glasgow, agreeing that the positives outweigh the negatives. “It’s obviously easier to go home whenever you want, and if I want to see my friends from home, they’re always right here.”  
“I feel like my challenges are just doing too much,” admits Wells. “The stuff that I do in the summer or over break, I still try to do when I’m at school. I have a hard time separating school time from family time because it’s hard for me to…,” she pauses, struggling to articulate how she feels.  
“Compartmentalize,” chimes in one of Wells’s teammates, providing the perfect word to encapsulate Wells’s difficulty with separating her commitments at school from those at home.  
“Yeah, exactly,” Wells nods while turning to smile at her teammate. “I have a hard time saying no to both sides, so then I’m mixing them together, and I get overwhelmed a lot.”  
“I also feel guilty when I don’t see my family,” Glasgow adds.  
“My parents will ask me to do something or help them out, which I’m happy to do, but if I didn’t go to school in Canton, I wouldn’t have to do that stuff,” Wells notes. “So it’s extra on top of school that I have to do.”  
“I think of that all the time,” affirms Paige.  

Attending college so close to home has downsides, especially for first-year students trying to acclimate to the new environment. Wells struggled at first, separating her SLU life from home. “I had a hard time freshman and sophomore year with making it two different worlds,” she recalls. “It was easy for me to go home, and I would just go all the time. I also kept all my life the same in Canton, so it was mixed way too much.”  

Larrabee did not face the same adversity as Wells because she remained on campus for the majority of the first two semesters. “My first year, I never went home unless it was a break,” Larrabee says. “I was able to just be a student and live my life on campus.”  

Similarly to Larrabee, Sipher also found success distancing herself from her house at the beginning of the year. “The first semester, I genuinely felt far away because I never went home unless it was for breaks,” acknowledges Sipher, emphasizing the importance of spending time on campus her first semester. Despite attending college in her hometown, Sipher does not feel limited by the proximity because she has the choice of whether or not to go home.