We let them crash on our couches, let them use our meal swipes and drive two hours to bring them to the airport. As busy college students, we still somehow make time for our siblings when they visit.
My sister visited me for a week after spring break, and although she had visited before, I still wanted to impress her with college life. My family lives far away, so I wanted to her to meet my friends that I’ve talked so much about and show her all my favorite places. This desire, I’ve found, is not unique among college students.
Sadie Schumacher, a sophomore art major, had her sister visit last year for the first time. She took her sister to get boba and Chipotle as a means of introduction to Jackson, but Schumacher was mostly on campus with her. They studied in the art studio, watched shows in the dorm and ran into friends.
“I think I was just so happy that she could meet the people that I had been talking about,” Schumacher said.
At the time, Schumacher didn’t know her roommates as well, and her sister was more comfortable sleeping on a makeshift bed on the floor of her room. This can create a different dynamic than what siblings are used to at home.
Rachel Allabaugh, a sophomore physics and engineering double major, remembered how it was slightly awkward her freshman year when her own sister visited.
“I think my roommates at the time had to adjust more, especially the ones that weren’t hanging out with us and didn’t get to know her as well,” Allabaugh said. “It may have been a little bit of an awkward moment for them.”
Thankfully, my current roommates get along so well with my sister that I joke she spent more time with them than she did with me. She went to dinner with them when I had to work and spent hours shopping in four different stores to find a dress for the Cardinal Ball. For me, it was a sweet time to reconnect with her, and I realized it had been a long time since we had spent a whole week together.
This rare occasion motivated me to show her Nashville and do something I wouldn’t normally do in the middle of the semester. This included braving torrential rain and thunderstorms, spontaneously grabbing Turkish food, touring the Parthenon, barely surviving flooded roads on the way back and having two hours to get ready for Cardinal Ball. I reflected on the day afterwards and decided it had been completely worth it, even though I hadn’t done any homework because I had spent it with my sister.
Seeing Union through my sister’s eyes made me realize how grateful I am to be at Union. Even though she wouldn’t admit it due to a slight competition between us about which school is better (she goes to Cedarville in the fall), she appreciated the space and resources that Union has to offer for recreation and dedicated studying. She also enjoyed how stores like Plato’s Closet are so close. Coming from the Northeast means the closest clothing store is 30 minutes away.
While she was here, we went to a Bible study that my room hosts, then attended a small group in someone’s home from my church. It made me consider hospitality at Union and in the church in a different way and how the culture we are in here sets us apart from other schools. We have the space and the resources to have game nights, Bible studies, birthday parties and other events in our dorms. This experience is something we will take with us after graduation and is a key component of pushing us out of childhood into adulthood.
Siblings often have an uncanny knack of perceiving things about us or our lives and pointing out things that we didn’t notice before. Allabaugh’s sister, who goes to Baylor, noticed the difference in student life.
“She’s constantly aware of the fact that there’s so many people that she doesn’t know,” Allabaugh said, referring to her sister at Baylor. There’s a uniqueness of being at a smaller university like Union and the opportunities it creates for knowing more people, something Allabaugh hadn’t appreciated until her sister mentioned it.
My sister, on the other hand, turned into a pseudo-college student. She was working out at the gym with us, doing homework in the library for six hours straight and searching through the fridge and eating spoonfuls of peanut butter. I’d like to think she just wanted to be like us — but in reality, she naturally went with the flow of our lifestyle. Since we only have three in our dorm, people asked us if she was our fourth.
“Yes, for a little while,” we would answer, then laugh.
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