As a child, Rebecca Durnell gathered her textbooks and headed for school. However, she didn't leave her house, but rather took her place at a desk in her basement along with her six brothers and sisters.

Durnell was home schooled. According to the National Center for Home Education, 1.23 million American students were home schooled in 1999. Many might believe that being home schooled puts students at a disadvantage when entering college. However, Durnell, 22; Jeremy Hall, 22; and Kyle Payne, 23, have quite a different view.

Y-press recently interviewed those three college students, all of whom were home schooled. Durnell, who grew up in Indianapolis, is a student at Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Va., studying government. Payne was raised in Crawfordsville and is in his second year of law school at Notre Dame after receiving his bachelor's degree from Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Mich. Hall is studying English literature at Purdue University and is from Indianapolis as well.

Instead of being in a classroom of 25 students the same age, Durnell, Payne and Hall sat in their basements along with their siblings of different ages. Payne's parents eventually built an additional room onto their house in order to home school their six children.

All three are from large families -- Durnell and Payne have five siblings and Hall has four -- and believe home schooling allowed them to be closer to their families than most other students.

"We got more attention," Payne explained. "I think I have a better relationship with my brothers and sisters and my parents."

According to these students, home schooling has more benefits than setbacks. Hall enjoyed the extra time it allowed for him to do different activities, such as playing the piano and coronet in a band. Payne and Durnell said learning at their own pace and having their education tailored to them prepared them for college as well.

Challenges in common

Deciding on which colleges to apply can be a challenging process for anyone, and home schoolers face the same challenges that other students do.

"If you want to go to a good college, you have to do well on your SAT. The only thing different was that I had a transcript, but it wasn't compared with anybody else's," Hall said.

"The only way they treated me differently was that because I didn't have a class rank or GPA really, I had to take both the SAT and the ACT," Durnell added.

Overall, the three didn't feel unwelcome by colleges. An exception for Hall was Indiana University. "They wanted me to take some extra tests to prove that I knew what I was doing," he said. Hall withdrew his application before hearing the college's decision.

After filling out their applications and being accepted to college, the big adjustment was changing from a classroom with five or six kids to a lecture hall of up to 100. Some assignments required some adjustment, too.

"Well, sometimes they had group projects that you had to do. I mostly like to work on my own and to think on my own at first, so I had to learn to trust other people enough to study with them," said Hall. "I wasn't accustomed to that, but I got used to it."

All three felt fully prepared academically for college. With the free time in his home-schooling schedule, Payne had the opportunity to take college courses while he was still in high school.

"When I was a senior, I took four classes at Wabash College. I took pre-calculus, political science, religion and speech therapy," he said. "When I went to college for my first year, I was a little more prepared than I might otherwise have been."

Unlike Payne, Durnell did not really know what to expect from college. She said she didn't feel that home schooling made her unique, as her first test proved. "It was just funny because all of us (in the class), I mean we were all from different backgrounds, but we were all scared to death about this test, because we'd never had a college test before," she said.

Without day-to-day interaction with other kids their age, socializing at college might be difficult for home schoolers. However, Durnell, Hall and Payne were up to the transition. "It was a little bit scary at first, but I think it is for everybody," said Hall. "I didn't know what to expect at first, but then I started to relax, I started to make some friends and I started to enjoy myself."

"Some people were surprised just because I didn't seem like the typical home schooler. I'm not sure exactly what they meant by that," Durnell said. "One of my best friends questioned me about it. She asked whether I thought I got a good enough education just being at home and not having professional teachers. But I really felt like I had."

"Meeting new friends was different," acknowledged Payne. "It wasn't horrible, and I was able to do it without too many problems, but it was a transition."

A bigger transition was being away from home. Homesickness is common among all college students -- for the first time in their lives they are alone in the world. This was especially true of these home-schooled students.

"I definitely got homesick, but I don't think that was because I was home schooled. I think it was because I am a normal person," Durnell said.

Homesickness was one of the reasons why Hall transferred from Cornell University to Purdue. "I wanted to be a little closer to home. When I was up in New York, I was only home a couple of times a year," he said.

With their satisfactory home-schooling experiences, Durnell, Payne and Hall say that they would gladly home school their future children as well. However, the three also said that if their children want to attend public school, they would approve of that as well.

ASSISTANT EDITOR: Cameron Johnson, 17, and Trey Johnson, 14.

REPORTERS: Gabrielle Bibeau, 12; Kimberly Heron, 12; and Rebecca Salois, 11.