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Where are you going? What are you doing? Who are you going with? When will you be back?

You will most likely recognize the “W” words from your earlier English classes.

More importantly, you may recognize these questions from personal experiences at home.

There are several adjustments that college students returning home after graduation may have to make. Not only do you have to relearn how to take showers without wearing flip-flops, that not all meals come on plastic trays, that most people do not wear pajama pants outside of their rooms and cards do not open doors, but you also have to learn how to live outside of the college atmosphere and with your parents and siblings. This, however, may be harder than living with your freshman year roommate.

It’s a great feeling to go home and be welcomed by your parents with open arms after a haranguing week of finals, papers, and last-minute projects. You breathe in the familiar “home” smells and flop into your own comfortable bed while taking in all the accustomed-to sights in your room. “There’s no place like home,” you think – for about a week. Then suddenly your house, which is comparatively bigger than your dorm room, seems too small for a family to live in without someone getting hurt.

The moment this happens, you realize that you have now officially moved back home and something has to change. The questions mentioned earlier will now be asked of you whenever you wish to leave the house. You will recall your high school days with its curfews and multiple questions and you will think to yourself, “Why are my parents asking so many questions? When I was away at school they didn’t know everything that I did.”

And this is true.

But you are not at school anymore, and your parents will know more about what you do now, than what you did before when you were away at college. And as ‘after-school special’ as this may sound, you need to know that your parents are asking these questions and involving themselves in your life because they care. (And after all, isn’t that one of the great reasons for going home anyways?) Your parents are adjusting to you being home too.

One way to minimize any altercations that might occur is to have a good sense of communication with your parents and hesitate before making rash comments. Rash comments will only worsen the situation. So before your parents ask where you are going, give them the facts on your own. Talk with your parents about how hard it may be for everyone with you living back home and wanting to exercise the freedoms you so enjoyed while living away at school. If they hear how you feel, they may be more sympathetic and understanding to your situation, and the same will go for you when you hear how they feel. It will save the headaches and nastily exchanged words.

Another thing that you enjoyed at college was your privacy. If you wanted to be left alone, you could close your door. Your suitemates would know to back off and give you some time to be by yourself. Your friends know that when you want to talk, you’ll make the move. Your siblings do not know this. More than likely, they have missed you and want to know what you have been up to and what is going on in your life. You are now a part of their daily lives again, but had been a missing part for some four years. Allow some time to catch up with them. Get reacquainted with them, and they will be more willing to give you your desired privacy when you want it.

You have moved back home and are an integrated part of your family again. Act like it. If you want to be treated like a responsible adult at home, act like a responsible adult at home. Help with the cleaning and other things around the house that need to be done and that you can do. Your parents will appreciate it, and most likely take your wishes for a little more privacy and freedom with closer consideration.

One of the hardest things to adjust to when moving back home is that you no longer have “the loop.” The loop contained everything that you needed to survive at college and protected you from the outside world. Now, most of the things that you need and want are outside of that two-mile circumference - including your friends.

Your friends are no longer living in the next town, townhouse, room or bed over from you. They are towns away, if not states away, from where you are living now. However, just because you are not right next door to your favorite drinking buddy, closest classmate or trustworthy roommate, does not mean that you can shirk the responsibilities of being a true friend. Keep in touch! Make plans to get together for a day, call each other, send e-cards or you could always take advantage of your local post office and send a hand-written letter. If you keep your friends just as involved in your life as you did when you were at school, you will maintain those friendships far after the graduation and diploma. Close friends can remain close, despite the distance that may separate them.

Graduation inevitably means a new step in one’s life and this new step comes with new changes and adjustments. You are going to miss the loop, the midnight coffee runs, the versatile usages for duct tape and pushpins, and the orange juice that you bought not to have at breakfast, but to make fuzzy navels with later on. But, enjoy the two-ply toilet paper, the cups that aren’t disposable, the silverware that does not break, dinners employing more than two of the five food groups, walls that are not paper-thin and the holiday season without the pressure of finals. And most importantly, enjoy your hard-earned degree and your family.