I live in California and the school I want to go to is in Illinois. I don't know how to handle going that far away from my family... help

How old are you? Which school?

I know that some Illinois universities will allow almost total distance learning as long as the student comes onto campus for orientation freshman year. There may be a requirement to spend a short amount of time on campus each school year thereafter, depending on the school.

Each school's admissions office should be more than willing to explain their policies on distance learning.

But why do distance learning? The most fun of it all is to meet new people, be involved in real-life classroom discussions, eat new foods in the cafeteria, and stay up late with dormmates studying for exams and writing papers. The college community experience is worth as much as the education you will get.

Don't you have another whole year to work on this? It's too late to think about applying to colleges in August. Unless you are talking about private (high) school.

CA has such a huge and good university system for good prices, you can start there if you are worried, and transfer later. Are your parents trying to encourage you to leave to get you to be more independent?

What is your real question here? You posted this under the Distance learning forum. This forum is for question about learning from home or at a distance, generally things like correspondence schools or online universities.

But you seem to be more concerned with how to handle being away from home, family and friends for so long and that would be a different forum.

So please post back and let us know how we can help you.