First-year student Matt Serafin adjusts to his new room while dad Bob Serafin works on setting up a bunk bed. (Suzanne Carr Rossi photo.)
It was only 5 a.m. when Matt Serafin and his parents drove away from their home in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, headed for Matt’s first year at the University of Mary Washington.
If Tamara and Bob Serafin felt any anxiety about taking the older of their two children to college, Matt wouldn’t have known. Once settled in the car with a semester’s worth of possessions, he went right back to sleep.
When the Serafin family arrived at UMW, they and hundreds more students, parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents and other helpers found the unloading process running smoothly.
This year’s entering class numbers 770, with another 260 transfer students. But several student groups had arrived on campus days early to participate in pre-semester activities, and returning upperclass students will move in this weekend. So first-year move-in day – Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2023 – was chill both figuratively and literally. Read more.