Keith’s Migration Story

My personal experience with migration has not involved immigration into a new country. The migration I have undergone has been migration between different parts of New York State. I have lived in three different parts of New York.

I was born in Central Islip on Long Island. My father’s family lives on Long Island and my mother’s family lived there at one point before I was born. My mother had moved to this region for work opportunities. After my sister and I were born, my mother quit her job and started working only part time so that she could take care of us. Shortly afterward, my parents decided that it would be a good idea to move. The area in which we lived had a high crime rate but was more expensive to live in than many other areas of New York State.

When I was three years old my parents moved my family from Long Island to upstate New York, where my mother grew up. As my parents searched for a new house, my family lived with my grandmother and my aunt minutes outside of the city of Poughkeepsie. My parents found our new home in a small town called Clinton Corners. The house was in a quiet development in a town with very little to do. The number of businesses in the town could be counted on one hand. However, it was just a short drive from towns with much more to do.

Poughkeepsie was just half an hour from my family’s home. Along with being the home of my grandma and aunt, it was where just about everything else was. Poughkeepsie has shopping centers, movie theaters, restaurants, and more. My family went there almost every other weekend. Another town near where I lived was Millbrook, where I went to school. It was a fifteen minute drive from Clinton Corners. Millbrook is a stereotypical American town. It contains many small businesses and a community feel. It is a place where most people know each other. My graduating class had about ninety students in it and many of them had been my classmates since kindergarten. One problem with Millbrook is that it has very little diversity.

After living in a small town with not much to do but go to other, somewhat larger towns for most of my life, I became bored with my surroundings. When I started looking into colleges to attend, I decided I wanted to go someplace much more exciting. I didn’t want to completely leave my family and friends so I didn’t want to go so far away that I could only see them on breaks. I realized that New York City was the perfect place for me to go. It is under two hours from Poughkeepsie by train, which is far enough away that I wouldn’t be able to live at home but close enough that I could go home on weekends and contained plenty of excitement. In addition, the diversity of New York City would be a positive change from the almost homogeneous towns I was used to. I narrowed down my college search and decided on Baruch College.

I moved to New York City in the end of August, after a week of commuting for school. My experience in New York City has been exactly what I hoped it would be. However, the hurricane that arrived in the city hours after I did may have been a little bit more excitement than I was hoping for.