When I first came to NJIT as a freshman, all I wanted to do was go home. Sure, the first day was fun—I was too busy meeting new people and finding my new classes. But as soon as night rolled along, I would find myself crying—or at least bemoaning my state. I was homesick, ME, homesick. Being away from home had never bothered me before, but all of a sudden, the only thing I could think of _was_ getting home. I missed my room, my stuff, my friends, my parents, and even my sisters. I also hated my room, barely knew my roommate or anyone else at the school, I was terrified of Newark, and my professors hated me (or so I believed at the time). The only thing that kept me from driving home was the fact that I had no car.

As the week wore on, though, I started missing home less and less. My roommate turned out to be a wonderful person (contrary to the "roommate from hell" stories I had heard), and I started to make friends and like my classes. Newark still scared me, but there wasn’t much I could do about that. Soon, I started to slip, sometimes calling my closet of a dorm room home. Sure, I still missed my real home, but it didn’t hurt so much. And when time came to move out of Redwood dorm and into a new dorm room, I was able to pick up and move without too much trouble.

I never really understood—or even realized—why that happened until I was watching an episode of Voyager and the resemblance to my situation jumped out at me. I couldn’t help but dwell on how true that was—and how similar the situation on Voyager was to my own. Sure, they are stuck seventy years from home while I could go home on any weekend I choose, but the rest hit close to home (no pun intended). Here were a bunch of people thrown together in an unfamiliar place, far from their homes, families and friends. And after a while of grumbling and homesickness, they’ve settled in, making Voyager home.

This is where the universal truth hits—"home is where you are." I was raised with a set of morals and rules which made me who I am today, and which made the place where I grew up home. These rules were familiar and comfortable, like the environment around me. When I left home, I carried those rules and beliefs with me, and soon they emerged, adapted, for my new environment. Make my bed every morning, room cleaning on Friday, etc. Things that I used to moan and complain about no longer bothered me—in fact, I became rather fastidious about them—anything to make the place "like home." I carried a piece of home with me, wherever I went—because home, in part, is who I am, and what I believe in. And though I couldn’t replace the people I left behind, I carried a piece of them with me, too.

Each crewmember of Voyager brought with him a different background, a different culture, which lent a hand in reshaping this foreign ship into a home. Like me, they soon learned, though unconsciously, to turn Voyager into a familiar place, filled with friends who soon became a sort-of family. By taking the home within them, they make a home wherever they go—and prove that as long as they are there, even the Delta Quadrant can be home.