For three whole weeks we have been on glorious vacation. We have gotten to sleep in real beds, have our moms do our laundry, and have eaten more food than we probably should. Now, the start of a new semester is upon us and we flood back to Boston en mass to get ready for another three months in the place we call our home away from home.
1. You have to get back to school. With planes, trains, and cars, you do not think of travelling back to school as a challenge, but it actually is. First, you have to pack for three months away from home in two suitcases where you have to shove in bulky winter sweaters and slinky tank tops for when the seasons change. Then, you have to do the act of travelling, but of course there is always snow so everything is delayed which causes stress. Naturally, your first class of the semester is an 8am, so you have no wiggle room at all with flights or train schedules. Traffic coming into Massachusetts the day before all the colleges start back up is always a nightmare, so unless you can hop on a broomstick and fly in, you’re screwed.
2. There are somehow always more people on campus. I do not know how this happens, but the student population seems to increases exponentially for the Spring semester. Being an NUin student, I helped with this population increase last year but still, doesn’t anybody leave for Co-op anymore?
3. You have a whole new schedule. Just when you finally got your Fall semester schedule down and you knew where all your classes were, the semester ended. Now, you don’t know when a good time to eat is or when to take your daily twenty-minute power nap, so you end up tired and hangry in the middle of your first day of classes.
4. Someone thinks they can start taking your secret study spot on campus. We all have that one spot on campus that we call “our spot”, even if we have no right to it at all. It is just a general understanding that on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays at 9:40 am the big round table in the back of the library is yours. Now, someone feels they have the right to sit there and you have to kindly explain to them that this is your spot.
5. The textbooks cost more than the plane tickets to get back here. I have an online textbook that costs more than round trip tickets to Florida. I see a problem with that.
6. Syllabus week is not even a break any more. I had two tests the first week of school. That’s not a break, that’s just torture.
7. Not only are we coming into a new semester, but we are also coming into a frozen tundra where it gets dark early and is colder than cold. It just makes it that much harder to be social when you feel like you can’t breath when you walk outside because it is so cold.
8. You might have to introduce yourself in front of the whole class. We all dread hearing our professors say “so why don’t we go around the room and everyone will introduce themselves and say one fun thing you did over break.” The only thing I did over break that was fun was eat a whole pizza by myself, and a lot of people just consider that unhealthy and not fun.
9. We are all now one semester closer to being adults and that is the scariest part of all. Soon, we will have to spread our wings and fly, and our college years will just be distant memories of drinking and late night partying.