You’ve finally made it.

Mom and Dad have said their tearful good-byes, and they’re on their way back home, but not without stressing how this is “the most important time in your life.” And they’re right. There are a lot of new things you’re going to have to get used to.

There’s no one here to forbid you to eat Fruit Loops for dinner. No one’s going to yell at you for wearing the same pair of jeans eight days in a row. And Mom is not going to force you to get a haircut.

But all that stuff is true of life at any institution of higher learning. New students at Iowa State have a whole new realm of goodies to get used to because Ames has its own unique flavor that every student here has had months (or minutes) to digest. And many people have taken quite a while to get used to it.

For some, this town of 48,000 has always been home; graduating from Ames High to Iowa State was a natural progression. According to Ames High School officials, between 30 and 40 percent of graduating seniors who go on to four-year colleges attend Iowa State.

Even the lure of a much larger city was not enough to keep Erin Block, a senior in psychology, away from her hometown.

She went to the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., a school of about 5,000 students, for her freshman semesters, but moved back to Ames to attend ISU for her second year. “I wanted a bigger school, and Iowa State has good programs in engineering, which I cared about at the time,” she said. “I just was looking for more diversity than there was at St. Thomas.”

The variety of people in Ames and its population was quite a shock for many whose high school graduating classes barely hit three digits.

Haley Aduddell, a senior in chemical engineering from Cherokee, a town of about 7,000 in northwestern Iowa, said her first experience in Ames was “a big change” from what she was used to.

“I was pretty overwhelmed,” she said. “Being from a smaller high school, it was easy to get involved in things. So [at Iowa State] I did Veishea; I joined a sorority. Now I’m president of Pi [Beta] Phi. It made school a lot smaller, which is what you have to do at a big school. You have to find your niche.”

Others, though, hail from much further locales than Iowa. Many have traveled from far and wide. Every state of the union and a few dozen countries around the globe are represented by students at ISU. And they’ve all had to adjust not only to a new city, but also to their physical surroundings.

Several people commented on the sprawling beauty of the campus. “The first time I came, I just saw the campus,” said Eric Bauer, a junior in physics from Floral City, Fla., a town about the size of Ames. “I liked it a lot. I’ve seen quite a few other campuses, and I liked how Iowa State is all centralized and not permeated with businesses, at least not yet.”

Melissa Fry, a senior in journalism and mass communication from Kansas City, Mo., agreed that the university grounds were enough to make even the most worldly landscape architect swoon. “The campus didn’t look like Iowa,” she said. “The drive all the way up here is really flat, but the campus is very green and beautiful.”

One thing that many non-Iowans — and not just southerners — despise about the campus is the need for snow fences. The harsh winters and necessary gear (sturdy boots, mittens, dog sled, etc.) left some people completely unprepared for life with a very bitter Old Man Winter.

“Oh, Jesus,” Bauer said. “The winter was pretty bad. I was kind of sad. I wondered why the big, long summer break wasn’t over the winter months. I didn’t even have any jeans. All I had was shorts.”

Iowa winters are not just harsh to those who get to bask in the sun year-round. Leslie Pease, a general graduate student from Houston spent a couple of years at graduate school at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. She said the 250 miles between KU and Iowa State make a big difference as far as the weather goes.

“The thing I miss most is a warm climate,” she said. “That was just the one thing I wasn’t prepared for. Even Kansas isn’t that cold. It’s amazing that four hours north is so much colder.”

Not only are winters a cause for groans, but some students also detest summer. Lance Foster, a graduate student in landscape architecture from Helena, Mont., a town of about 30,000 people, said that the Iowa humidity brings out the worst in the extreme seasons.

“It’s more damp here, so heat is worse, and the cold is too,” he said. “People here think an 80-degree day is nice, but for me, it’s just too hot.”

While the weather may not be exactly what some people bargained for, many people seem to think that Ames residents make up for it with their warmth. Almost everyone noticed a genuinely neighborly atmosphere in this town. “Everyone is friendly,” Fry said.

“Everyone waves at you, no matter what. … [People in Ames] just stop on the street for directions. You do that in a big city, and somebody might pull out a gun and blow your head off,” she said.

The rarity of such serious crime is a nice change of pace for those who are used to locking their doors and avoiding eye contact with people on the street. Block also mentioned the cleanliness of the town and of the water.

While many students transplanted from big cities might initially gripe that “there’s nothing to do in this town,” those who have been in Ames long enough know that’s not completely true. Along with the benefits of a small town — friendly fast food cashiers, being able to walk alone at night, no trash in the streets — come huge advantages for young people because of Iowa State’s presence in Ames.

“With the university here, we get a lot of the benefits of a big town, like concerts and plays,” Block said.

The Iowa State Center, Maintenance Shop, People’s Bar and Grill and other Ames establishments manage to snag major touring entertainment groups because of the town’s audience and its facilities. From Van Halen, to Guys and Dolls, to Reba McEntire, Ames residents have the best of both worlds. And students are even luckier: They usually can score some kind of discount to these shows.

Some students, though, admit that it is nice at times for ISU and the city of Ames to be completely different entities. “I like that the school is separate from the community,” Aduddell said. “The community gets involved in a lot of things, but it’s comforting to know that almost every person on campus is in the same situation, as far as school and finances go.”

And even if you’re extra picky and nothing happening in Ames is floating your boat, there are several cities within road-tripping distance. “The only thing you can find in big cities that you can’t find here are really big museums and nice places to eat,” Foster said. “But Ames is good with restaurants, especially Asian food, and if I want to go to a museum, I can go to Minneapolis. So it’s okay, as long as you have a car.”

Pease agreed: “You can drive a short distance and get big-city things.”

But even the vehicularly challenged need not despair. That’s what feet and friends with cars are for. “I could walk places,” Fry said. “I lived in Helser my freshman year, and I could walk to Campustown if I needed something. And if I needed groceries, there was always someone on the floor with a car who I could go with.”

But friends and a car are not the tickets to happiness and adjustment, of course. Everyone has to find something that takes away that empty feeling inside. For some, it’s $80 phone bills and going to Sunday Mass every week. For Foster, visiting Ledges Park in Boone reminds him of Montana’s forests and eases the homesickness. For Aduddell, greek life “was the big kicker.” And for Bauer, it was realizing that home really is where you hang your hat.

“When you move really far away from where you grew up and everything you know, you learn that it’s the same thing no matter where you go,” he said. “I wouldn’t say that I regret coming here. Ames is nice. Iowa is nice.”