Room 307 in Fisk Hall buzzes with the sound of people thinking. Two instructors and four of my fellow students crowd around a silver laptop at a table in the center of the room, examining the latest design for the page you are currently viewing. Microsoft Word, Adobe Dreamweaver and various Web pages flash on the bulky computer screens sitting on desks around the walls of the white room. The sounds of key strokes float through the air. I know I’ll miss this the most.

With only a few days left in the summer program, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it’s going to be like when I get home. There are some things I’ll miss, like seeing my best friends at all hours of the day and night, and some things I won’t, like the staircase in Jones Residential College that always smells like feet.

Mostly I think that going home will just be strange.

When I get back to Livonia, Mich., I know things won’t feel the same as they did before. I won’t have a journalism class at 7 p.m. every night where I can sit and listen to people in the field talk about their experiences. The strangest will, of course, be living in my house. I won’t see my friends when I wake up in the morning and I can’t ramble to my roommate about my day at night. Eventually I’ll get used to this again, but in the mean time, I can’t help but wonder how I’m going to live without seeing Professor Roger Boye at 9 o’clock each morning.

The strangest change by far will be school. I’ll have my schedule decided for me by some school administrator that has no idea who I am, or worse, a piece of probably outdated machinery sitting in some dusty room hidden somewhere in the school. I’ll have six hours of my day planned down to the very minute with things I may or may not care about and that other people may not care about. I’ve even forgotten what it’s like to deal with people who don’t care about what they do. How will I survive?

Even all of that I think I can get used to again. There is one thing, though, that the National High School Institute Journalism Division has changed in me forever. Never again will I be used to uttering these always awkward words.

“Can I go to the bathroom?”