By Kurt Masline
Many come here knowing few people. They pay more in tuition. Some live multiple time zones away from family. But out-of-state students still learn to call the University of Maryland home.
The number of out-of-state students hovered around 25% in fall 2020 and spring 2021, according to the UMD Office of Institutional Research, Planning and Assessment. While students said college is an adjustment for everyone, attending a school hundreds of miles away from home can add to the challenges — especially amid the pandemic.
“I feel like it’s a fun little personality trait to say I’m from Colorado,” said Stephen DeCoste, a sophomore government and politics major from Highlands Ranch, Colorado, a suburb south of Denver. “It instantly makes people interested in who I am, where I came from and my experiences.”
DeCoste said he knew he wanted to go to college on the East Coast when he was a sophomore in high school. As he got more serious about wanting to go to law school and studying international relations, DeCoste started focusing on schools in the Washington area. He ultimately chose UMD in part because of the proximity to the city and his family connections to the school.
DeCoste spent the first semester of his freshman year in fall 2020 taking classes online from Colorado and moved to Maryland at the start of the spring 2021 semester. He said it can be frustrating to be an out-of-state student during the pandemic because of the logistics and risks associated with traveling and concerns about his parents’ health.
“There was definitely a concern with coming out here that something could happen and I wouldn’t be there or vice versa,” DeCoste said.
For senior bioengineering major Kaitlyn Albus, who is from Agoura Hills, California, living in an off-campus apartment lessened the urgency put on traveling home when the pandemic began during the second semester of her sophomore year.
“I didn’t really have to think about my housing getting taken away from me,” Albus said.
Albus said she thinks freshman year is a transition regardless of where you’re from.
“Everyone’s adjusting whether you’re from out of state or in state,” Albus said. “College is just so different from high school.”
Albus said the time zone change from California to Maryland didn’t take long to acclimate to, but when she returned to California to finish the school year online, she ended up taking a final exam at 5 a.m. She said communication with family back home would’ve been more challenging if they were three hours ahead of her instead of the other way around.
Students from other states on the East Coast don’t have to think about a time change when they arrive at UMD, but that doesn’t eliminate other differences that come with being an out-of-state student.
Charles Karafotias, a junior computer science major from Middleton, Massachusetts, said he chose UMD because of the computer science program and fun activities such as attending sports games. He had to adjust to some regional differences, though. Karafotias said he learned that Maryland and Massachusetts have grocery stores that have different names even though they belong to the same parent company. He also didn’t know many people attending UMD going into his freshman year, with the exception of his orientation group.
Karafotias said it didn’t take long to learn his way around campus because he visited UMD three times before deciding to attend. He has been exploring Washington and started driving around campus this semester.
DeCoste has been navigating Washington by metro and said it can be daunting, especially since a train system would be “unheard of” in his hometown. But he wants to stay in the area after graduation.
“It feels like a strange sense of being home, which is how I know it’s the right place to be,” he said.
Featured image: Around one quarter of UMD students are from states other than Maryland. State leaders in out-of-state undergraduate enrollments include New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania, according to university statistics. Photo courtesy S. Masline.