The first thing I noticed when pulling onto the Mount Ida Campus was the lack of vehicular traffic. Rather than the usual hoard of students utilizing the crosswalk on Massachusetts Avenue, a flock of turkeys held up my move in instead.

There weren’t any other cars on the road leading up to the only residential building, New Hall. There weren’t any Minute Movers eagerly awaiting my arrival. The stark change in atmosphere from my home campus startled me in the initial moments. I had no clue what to expect, as I did not know anyone who had lived in or even visited the Mount Ida campus before.

I am a sophomore living on the Mount Ida campus of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in Newton, Massachusetts for the spring of 2020 while I intern at WGBH in Boston.

The program through which I found my internship, SBS in Boston, has only been around for two years, making my cohort the second group of UMass students to live at the Mount Ida campus. The program offers the opportunity for SBS students to partake in an internship in the Boston area for a semester. The college also secured rooms at the Mount Ida Campus where students will live with other interns that are also in the program. To make this process easier for other students interested in interning within the city and/or living at Mount Ida, I will be writing about my experience over the duration of the semester.

The move in process wasn’t difficult, since no one else was moving in at the same time. My mother and I were able to take our time pushing the moving bins through the empty corridors. After initially getting lost, we finally made it to my room and my jaw dropped.

Having lived in a tiny Southwest corner room last semester, I was nervous to be moving into another one on this new campus. But Mount Ida did not disappoint. Like UMass, Mount Ida is composed of single, double and triple rooms, but instead of having one small window facing another student’s room, I now had two windows which spanned the length of the wall from top to bottom.

The best feature of the room, albeit the smallest, is a thermostat. For the same price as my Southwest corner room, I could now control the temperature as I desired. The highest the temperature goes is 80 degrees Fahrenheit and I haven’t had any desire to find out how low it can go.

The rest of the building boasts some wonderful features, which I will get into another day.

As I begin this journey at the new campus, I cannot help but feel a sense of excitement in knowing that future students will be following in my footsteps. Although things seem brand new and scary now, I anticipate that my fellow students and I will reflect back at this semester as a wonderful new adventure in which we somewhat pioneered the presence of UMass in Newton, Massachusetts.

Sara can be reached at [email protected].