47 Leaving for College Messages That Skip the Lecture

The card is not a lecture

In September 2021 I drove my godson Barnaby to the station at Barnstaple with a car full of bedding, a kettle with no descaler in it, and a card I wrote the night before in a state of real confidence. The card had eleven pieces of advice in it. Eleven. Budget, library, societies, a sentence about drinking water that I would cross out with my own hand now. He read it on the train to Exeter, kept it in his desk drawer, and texted me a photograph of it that November with exactly one line underlined, the postscript, which was not advice at all. It said the spare key was under the blue pot if a train ever got cancelled and he needed his old bed.

He used the key in October. The last train was cancelled, he let himself in at half past eleven, slept in his room, and left a note on the fridge that said the kettle was still broken. That is the lesson, and it took me eleven wrong lines to learn it: a leaving card works when it gives the student something that is theirs, an open door, a standing arrangement, a fact about home, and fails when it hands them homework. Who is writing matters most here, because a parent, a sibling and a friend are not leaving the same person, even when the name on the envelope matches.

Here is the same card both ways. The first is the one most of us draft at midnight. It means well and lands like a briefing:

We are so proud of you! Remember to work hard, join lots of societies, budget carefully, call home often and make the most of every opportunity. This is the start of the rest of your life!

Barnaby. Key under the blue pot if the trains fail you. Sunday at seven if you are in. The kettle is your problem now, I have done my part. Go and find your people.

The second card is shorter, ruder, and was kept in a drawer for three years. Specifics are the part the reader can hold on the train when the carriage goes quiet.

From a parent: say the house part plainly

A parent's card carries two facts no other writer can send: what the house will be like without them, and what home still offers from a distance. Skip either and the card floats. Pride takes one sentence. Spend the rest on the house: the room, the chair, the Sunday call, the terms on which they can come back, change their mind, or ring on a bad Tuesday.

• You do not need a speech from me at the door. You have a room to unpack, a kettle to argue over, and a first week that is yours. I am proud of you, the house is proud of you, and Sunday evening is still ours by phone if you want it.
• The bedroom door stays open, the way it has all summer. Not as a shrine and not as a storage room either. It is your room, it will look lived in again by Christmas, and in between I will be in there stealing your phone charger like always.
• I packed this card under the mugs, which means you will find it after the first tea crisis and not before. That is the right order. Make the tea, sit on the bed that is not made yet, then read this: you were ready in June, you are ready now, and being homesick on day three changes neither of those.
• No advice in this one. You have had eighteen years of it and most of it was about bins. Just this: I liked who you were at this kitchen table, arguing about everything, and college gets that person, not some improved model you have to assemble by October.
• If the first month is thin and strange, ring home and say exactly that. Do not wait until it is a better story. We can do a bad Tuesday here. We have had plenty of practice and we are weirdly good at them.
• Your dad has cried twice about the empty chair and denied both times while standing next to the chair. I am writing it down so it is on the record. We will miss you in the ordinary ways, at meals and in the car, and ordinary missing is bearable. Go and fill the week up.
• Money is folded in the back of this card. It is not for books, whatever your grandmother tells her friends. It is for the first takeaway with people whose names you are still learning, because that meal does more work than any welcome talk.
• You are allowed to change your mind about the course, the hall, the whole plan. A card that only works if everything goes right is a contract, and this is not one. This is the address, the phone number, and two people who answer both.

From a grandparent, or the relative who will not be at the station

Some writers will not see the departure at all, and their card has to do the work a platform hug would have done. That argues for the practical over the grand: food arrangements, letter arrangements, one family story that places this leaving in a line of leavings the family has already survived. A grandparent who left home with a cake tin is not being nostalgic. They are issuing evidence.

• I am not coming to wave at a train, because at my age a platform goodbye takes a week to get over. So here is the goodbye in writing, where I do it better. Eat one proper meal a day, write your name in your good jumper, and ring me when the washing machine eats something.
• Your grandfather left home at seventeen with a suitcase his mother packed and a cake in a tin that lasted him a month of Sundays. You are leaving with a duvet, a laptop and forty opinions. The suitcase part is easier now. The homesick part is the same, and it passes, usually mid-morning.
• I have put my address on the back of this card in proper writing, because a letter from college is a thing I intend to collect. One a term will do. I will reply within the day and I will not correct the spelling, which is growth, for me.
• Everyone will tell you these are the best years. Ignore the ranking. Some of it will be marvellous and some of it will be a wet Wednesday in a launderette, and both sorts count as the experience. Tell me about the Wednesdays. Anyone can write home about a party.
• The biscuit tin is in your bag, refilled, with the shortbread you pretend to like less than you do. When it is empty, post it back. That is the whole arrangement, and it has worked for your mother, your uncle, and now you.
• I do not know what a seminar leader is and I am too old to start. I know you read three books in a week in July because you wanted to, not because anyone set them. A place full of people doing that on purpose is your sort of place. You will find them.

From a sibling: the room, the leftovers, the lift

Siblings hold the household's real archive: who owes whom a hoodie, whose charger is whose, what the dog did. A sibling card that reaches for parental warmth sounds borrowed, and the recipient can tell in one line. Write the ledger instead. Debts, rooms, lifts, the split of news into the version parents get and the version siblings get. Affection arrives through the inventory, intact.

• Your room is not becoming my room. Mum floated it once and I said no, partly out of loyalty and partly because your walls have heard things. It stays yours, posters, damp patch and all, until you come home and complain about it in person.
• I am keeping the car argument alive in your absence. Every Saturday I will still say your playlist is better than mine, lose, and put yours on for the supermarket run. Somebody has to maintain standards while you are off becoming educated.
• You owe me one charger, two hoodies and the good headphones you swore you returned in March. Debt suspended until Christmas. Interest is one story per item, told at the table, with names.
• Text me the real version. Mum gets the version with meals and lectures in it, I get the 1 a.m. one where the hall is weird and nobody talks to anyone yet. That was always the split in this house. It survives the move.
• I will miss you at the exact moment the dog does something disgraceful and there is nobody to witness it properly. Photographs are not evidence. Hurry home at reading week and I will re-enact the whole thing in the kitchen.
• Last one to leave gets the other's share of Sunday washing up, forever, those were the rules we made in 2019 and I have the note. You are leaving first. I accept your surrender and your share of the gravy boat.

From a friend who is also leaving, or staying

Friend groups split in September, and the split is the thing nobody writes about. Some go far, some go near, some stay and watch the street empty. Name the split without making it a tragedy, because it is also a trade: a sofa in a new city against news from home. Name the group chat, the visit, the playlist, the report you expect. Vague promises to stay in touch are how friendships are politely closed.

• We have been in the same postcode since we were eleven and I have no idea how to do the big speech, so: same group chat, same terrible voice notes, and I will be on your floor in November whether the invite formally arrives or not.
• You are the only one of us going this far away, which makes you the expedition. Report back properly. Not the polished version for adults, the real one, with the names of everyone in your kitchen and who burned what.
• I am staying, you are going, and I refuse to make that the sad version. You get a new city. I get a free sofa in it and a reason to use the train line I have been ignoring for years. We both did fine out of this.
• If homesickness shows up, do not perform enthusiasm at me down the phone. We have known each other too long and I can hear it. Say it is rubbish this week. Then next week tell me about the one good thing, and I will pretend I spotted it coming.
• Your leaving present is this card and the playlist in your bag, which is ninety percent songs from the bus to school and ten percent new stuff I am forcing on you. A friendship should have some propaganda in it.
• We said no crying at the station and I am keeping that in writing, where it is easier. Cry on the train if you need to. Text me the view. I will text you a photograph of the empty seat on the bus, which is not the same and we both know it.
• By Christmas you will have stories I was not in, and I will have two months of news from a street you already know. That is the trade and it is fine. Bring the stories home and tell them slowly, at the table, where they belong.

For the student who is nervous, not excited

Many people reading leaving cards in September are not excited. They are frightened, flat, or performing enthusiasm for adults who keep asking. A card that insists on excitement gives them one more performance to give. These lines hand over permission instead: to start slowly, to judge nothing for three weeks, to ring home mid-wave rather than after the story has been tidied.

• You do not have to be excited yet. Everyone keeps asking if you are excited, as if there is an inspection. You are allowed to be mostly nervous and a bit flat about the whole thing. That is the honest starting position of about half the people on your staircase.
• Nothing has to be decided in the first fortnight except where the mugs live. Friends, societies, the version of you that college gets: all of that can be assembled slowly, in October, in November. Anyone who looks settled by Friday is performing, and performances are tiring to keep up.
• If you ring home crying in week two, that is not the experiment failing. That is a bad evening doing what bad evenings do. We will talk, you will sleep, the morning will be a different size. I am not going anywhere and neither is the number.
• You were the kid who took three weeks to join in at every new thing and then never wanted to leave. Remember that about yourself in September. Slow to start is your pattern, not your problem. Give it the three weeks before you judge it.
• Eat in the shared kitchen even when it would be easier not to. Not for the conversation, which may be nothing, but because a room you eat in becomes yours faster than a room you only sleep in. Small anchors first. The rest follows at its own pace.
• Homesick is not a verdict on the place or on you. It is what happens when a person with a good home leaves it, which is another way of saying the leaving proves the home worked. It will come in waves. Waves go back out.

For a transfer, a returner, or someone starting later than their friends

Not every departure is an eighteen-year-old with a new duvet. Students transfer after a miserable year, start in January, arrive at twenty-four after six years of shifts, or leave two years after their friends posted the same station photograph. The standard card, all first steps and new beginnings, misses them and sometimes insults them. Their leaving needs its timing honoured: what the delay taught, what the evidence said, what starting informed buys.

• Everyone else's leaving posts are from two years ago, and here you are starting now, on your own timetable, with a clearer idea of why than any of us had at eighteen. Late is not behind. Late is informed, and informed lasts longer.
• A transfer is not a failed first attempt, whatever that boy at the pub said. You tested a place, read the evidence, and moved. That is the skill the degree is supposed to teach and you have done it before the second year starts.
• You are going back after six years of work, a uniform, and a manager who called you kid until July. The eighteen-year-olds will think you are staff for the first week. Let them. You know how a rota works, how a bill works, and how you learn. That is a head start with paperwork.
• Gap year, savings, one retake, one long winter of night shifts: it is all in the bag you are carrying onto that train, and it is ballast, not baggage. You are the only fresher arriving who already knows what a bad job costs. Spend accordingly, in every sense.
• Starting in January means the welcome-week version is not yours, and that is mostly a relief. Arrive, find the library, find one person, find the cheap supermarket. The mid-year starters I know built smaller, stronger circles than the September crowds did. Quietly suits you.

Short lines for a group card, a gift tag, or money inside

Plenty of leaving cards are not cards at all: the inside fold of a group card at a family lunch, a tag on a bag of supplies, the flap of an envelope with train money in it. Short surfaces punish long feelings. One arrangement per line, stated flatly enough to be quoted back at Christmas. If a short line needs a second sentence to explain itself, cut it back.

• Train money in the fold. Spend it coming home at least once before Christmas, no questions asked about the visit's purpose.
• Your key still works. That is the whole policy, in writing, so there is no debate at the door in October.
• Sunday, seven o'clock, phone on loud. If you are out, out wins. If you are in, we talk.
• One postcard per term is the contract. Postbox at the end of your road. I checked.
• The dog has been told you are at a very long sleepover. He has accepted this. We have not, quite.
• Kettle descaler is in the blue box. Nobody tells you this part. Consider yourself told.
• Room kept. Charger theft continues. Everything else negotiable at Christmas.
• First meal back: your choice, my cooking, no washing up assigned to you until January. In writing, so I cannot wriggle.
• Text when the train moves. Not when it arrives, when it moves. That is the moment I want.

Lines to leave out, and why they wilt

A few stock lines turn up in departure cards every September, usually written by tired adults at midnight. They wilt for identifiable reasons, and it helps to see them together once:

Make us proud. / Do not let this opportunity slip. / These will be the best years of your life, so enjoy every second. / Call home every day, we will be waiting by the phone. / Now the real world starts.

"Make us proud" converts love into a results service. "Best years" sets a standard the first wet Wednesday fails. A daily-call demand hands a new student a guilt schedule before they have a timetable. And the real world was already running, in their part-time job and their kitchen at home. Write the house, the arrangement and the open door instead. Those survive October.

When the whole street, team or table wants to sign

One departure often collects more writers than one paper card can carry: the football team, the Saturday job shift, the cousins in three counties. By the time a paper card has done that round by post, the student has left, unpacked, and lost two mugs. A group card with room for everyone to sign solves the geography: one link, each person writes their own line in their own register, and the card can still arrive before the train does. You can create a card online in a couple of minutes, and the sibling who organises it should set a deadline a day earlier than the real one, because someone always signs at midnight.

Barnaby's blue flowerpot is still by my back door. It holds a cracked solar light he bought me as a joke the Christmas after he left, which charges all day and gives off about twenty minutes of serious glow at dusk, aimed at nothing. He is in his final year now and has used the key under it four times in total, twice for cancelled trains and twice, as far as I can tell, for the fridge. I have never moved the key. Some arrangements you do not review.

For the neighbouring moments, the graduation card guide covers the card that comes before this one, at the end of school, and the shipped high school graduation messages bank is the one to raid when results day and leaving day land in the same week. When the departure is a friend rather than a student, the shipped farewell messages for a friend bank carries the longer goodbyes, the ones where the person leaving is not coming back at Christmas.