“But it’s so easy for us,” Katie Flannery said into the webcam connecting her bedroom in Galway, Ireland, to mine in Starkville, Miss. “We’re all so close and the plane tickets are cheap, we’ve only to grab a ticket at the last minute and in an hour or so I’m sipping coffee in Paris.” Katie, my close friend and coworker during my internship in South Korea last spring, and I were discussing the relative ease it is for European citizens to travel and explore surrounding countries and, more importantly, her and her boyfriend’s plans to spend summer together in both Ireland and Finland. Katie and Tatu invited me over, but in need of summer classes and short on cash, I made the decision that I would be spending all three months of my summer vacation in Starkville.
Since becoming a student at Mississippi State University, I never once stayed in Starkville during a summer vacation; my freshman year, I stayed in the dormitory and returned to my parents’ home, and the summer after my sophomore year I was in South Korea interning.
However, I had always heard stories from friends about their experiences with and overall opinion of residing in Starkville once the classroom doors at MSU shut. Peoples’ reactions ranged from very good to very poor, some noted with positive recollection how enjoyable the university campus was without bikers threatening to mow you down at any time or freshmen shuffling around in close-knit litters with maps pressed against their noses. A friend of mine who worked at one of the bookstores around campus shared with me her thoughts when I informed her of my intentions to stay in Starkville over the summer: “It’s wonderful. You’re here alone and you have the entire town to yourself and there are no lines anywhere and the restaurants are never crowded.” The dissenters of a Starkville-lived summer repeatedly described a scenario that can be summed up in one word: boring. Without the soft glow of MSU, many felt the appeal of Starkville dimmed with the loss of a significant amount of the study body.
Stepping into a summer vacation I was unsure about, I came to find a summer in Starkville is wildly similar to a summer in any other small town in Mississippi in terms of both positive and negative attributes.
I took on employment at the beginning of May and began the great build-up to my two summer classes in the July semester; before then, I had concluded, I would have to find ways of leading a constructive existence without the structure of a regular class schedule.
The Sanderson Center offers summer packages for students, free for full-time summer students or something around thirty dollars a month if you are not (MSU encourages its students to live healthy and turn against the obesity rate of our state, but you have to pay, of course), and so I made a routine of working at my part-time job, exercising at the Sanderson Center and going to bed at a decent time so as not to lose all traces of civilized living in the freedom that summertime affords.
As for Starkville itself, the town continued to exist even in the absence of students: stores opened and closed and the potholes around town seemed to only grow in depth and impact. The pace of the town seemed to slow without the student bumper cars flooding the streets from early morning to midafternoon and the lines everywhere were much smaller and quieter; maneuvering and moving around town for a cup of coffee or groceries or whatever became somewhat of an enjoyable task.
Does Starkville magically transform into some Garden of Eden-esque existence during MSU’s summer vacation? No. However, Starkville during the months of May, June and July does take on an aura that withers in the presence of the 23,000 student body of our beloved university.
This charm of small town living, that I’m sure anyone reading this knows if you have grown up in Mississippi or any of its surrounding states, gives Starkville a fighting chance in the battle of being able to claim itself a “good” place to spend one’s summer. That’s not to say you should plan to shack up in Starkville every summer (I encourage everyone to seek out internships or travel if possible over a summer vacation, especially freshman and sophomore summer breaks).
Rather, I would say making a home in Starkville during summer break is an experience that can be an enjoyable and unique experience and prime for the upperclassmen who will likely have friends staying in town who can fend off the especially slow lifestyle of a Mississippi summer.
Joshua Bryant is a senior majoring in English literature. He can be contacted at
[email protected].