Unlike Miley, I don’t have to jump on a plane to LAX every time I need to go home. Luckily for me, home is just a stone’s throw away and across the pond in Denver, Colorado. Along with a majority of Colorado Mesa University’s (CMU) student population, many of us hail from the other side of the Rocky Mountains, making going home for a weekend much more accessible and doable than other schools.
However, with easy access to home, this begs the question; is CMU a suitcase school? To help preface and provide some context, a suitcase school is a school in which students are there to get their degree and GTFO. Generally, these schools have low post-graduation retention and the student population tends to drop off a cliff when classes aren’t in session.
Personally, I spend a lot of time on campus between school and on-campus employment, though I never found myself spending much leisure time on campus and often, I can’t wait to leave. I realize that I spend much more time on campus than most students, which is crazy considering I don’t feel like I’m on campus all that often.
So for an average student, especially ones who live off campus like myself, realistically only come here for their classes and leave. With only about 2,500 students living on campus, the remaining 8,000 of us certainly aren’t on campus often enough to even make it feel remotely as populated as it should be.
With the campus feeling empty during the weekends, once breaks start, the campus feels so empty it’s borderline apocalyptic. The absence of students on campus during break should be a testament to how little we do as a campus when classes aren’t in session. There’s little activity on the weekends and even during breaks to warrant spending any recreational or leisure time on campus, making it feel like a waste of time to even stay on campus during these off times when classes aren’t in session.
On top of everything else, Grand Junction isn’t an ideal place for non-outdoors activities. Though it’s gotten much better over the years, unless you want to hike/mountain bike, or ski/snowboard, there is very little to do for fun in the area.
We have a few bowling alleys, that are admittedly, a little run down, and a few entertainment places such as Bananas and the movie theaters, the list for recreational activities, especially for young adults, remains disappointingly short.
With that being said, as I prepare to graduate in the spring, the prospect of staying here in Grand Junction makes me flinch a bit. As someone who is relatively involved on campus and stays active pretty consistently, I personally can’t wait to move somewhere that has both more opportunity and more things in general to keep me busy.
Needless to say I by no means dislike Grand Junction or CMU, as I love both of them dearly. The opportunity here post-graduation feels minimal at best, offering little to people pursuing careers after they graduate. So to answer my question posed earlier, CMU is absolutely a suitcase school, but who ever said anything was wrong with that?
