“And no matter where we go, we always find our way back home.”

Andy Grammer’s lyric echoes a sentiment questioned by many of us at the start of the new school year, whether we are freshmen adjusting to college, students beginning our study abroad experience or seniors considering where to work and live next year. Should we always want to eventually find a way back “home?” Is that really what is best for us? Does returning “home” mean going backward, erasing how we have developed as people?

These questions are especially apropos for students at a university with a global student body. As high school seniors, we were pressured to find a school with the “right fit” so it could become our “home away from home.” During Wildcat Welcome, the question of “where are you from?” is ubiquitous before every icebreaker, evoking a list of our classmates’ cities that we struggle to remember, pressing each other to choose a single place of origin. Later, we may find out the real stories. “I grew up in Shanghai, but I went to an international high school in Switzerland,” or “I am from Chicago, Paris, England and India” or “I have lived in Evanston my whole life, but I am from Pakistan.”

We’re connected with our family and friends on our smartphones and laptops, we have everything we’ve written stored on our iClouds and we have everything we’ve done documented on our online calendars. A scroll through our Facebook timelines reminds us of the people we once were. When we can carry these remnants of “home” with us through technology, it is perhaps easier for our generation to identify home as a set of people and ideas rather than a place. This is not to discount the sentimental or motivational value of objects and places — “home” is the purest connection between the tangibles and the abstracts, between material objects and their associations. However, such distinction is crucial to defining ourselves and who we want to become. We must be able to equate “home” with people and ideas in order to create an environment for ourselves, wherever our ambitions may take us.

This is not to pretend that we should prefer “home” to anything else. We discover what we like and dislike largely through contrasts: a restaurant is better or worse compared to another; a class is more or less interesting than last quarter’s; a job is fulfilling in comparison to a different one. By being cognizant of how our current situation relates to “home,” we can identify our preferences. Maintaining a realistic image of this “home” also helps prevents nostalgia’s ultimate companion, disappointment. At the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences welcome for new students, the freshman class was challenged with the conflicting advice to both be open to new ideas and to be steadfast in our beliefs. We can reconcile the two, I think, if we remember “our roots,” both literally and intellectually, as our opinions change.

In the early days of nautical navigation, ship captains would plot their place of origin, their speed and their general direction to find their current location. Our lives are much the same way. If we do not know our starting point, we cannot know where we are now; we cannot aim at a future destination if we do not know from where we set out. We may never actually “find a way back home,” but we must at least understand from where we came so that we know where we are going.

Megan Angell is a Weinberg freshman. She can be reached at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this column, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected].

The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.