Despite Brown’s spring break just starting in less than two days, most other schools’ spring breaks have ended, and students are beginning to collect their end-of-semester thoughts. For some, these thoughts are bittersweet: feeling relieved to close a chapter of immense workload yet dismal that you’re leaving your friends from Brown behind as you return home. On the other hand, many of us are excited to break our study routine at Brown and embark on upcoming summer adventures. These adventures, however, are different for all of us depending on what part of our college journey we find ourselves in.
If you’re a first year, the end of your first spring semester can deteriorate your spirit. Why? Because you’ve just started to connect with your new friends and now will most probably say their summer goodbyes. I can confirm that my first year was a period of increasingly fluctuating uncertainty but ultimately translated into many unforgettable positive memories. But fear not: you’ll maintain your genuine friendship with them throughout your entire college experience! Summer internships for first-year students could be a productive way to fill your summer, but you don’t have to worry yet about super-high achievements in a bustling city. Your summer goal should be figuring out your passions and having fun. Traveling around Europe, spending two months in the Greek islands, or interning at a local office in your hometown in a career that piques your interest are some of the few options that await you. The world is your oyster!
Sophomores start to feel the mid-college-years agony when the end of the semester is approaching. You might start thinking about your “halfway-through-college” post that you’ll be uploading on the ride home. Finals might make you nervous, but they now know how the system works. You’ve have created a safety net with your friends from Brown, and knowing you won’t lose these connection over a three-month break is a confidence booster! After completing your first internship or summer travels, you might have narrowed down future career options or passion projects. You are more likely to start an internship during the summer that fuels your fire, which is great news!
Fellow juniors: a bridge of anguish forms as you walk into their senior year. Knowing that you only have one fall semester and one spring semester left creates can create a void; however, you can translate this void into many unforgettable memories you will forever treasure. With the end of the semester approaching, you realize how packed your summer breaks might be. Most juniors have 3 months of prestigious internships that will keep you more than occupied and truly value their brief time they spend while at home.
Last but not least, seniors embark on their emotional journey of starting to close a big chapter of your lives as you transition into the true life of an adult. You start recollecting memories from the beginning of Brown: from the moment you stepped into your first dorm room and finals became a breeze to the amazing memories you’ve shared during during spring break and weekends. You are now almost face-to-face with the day you’ll walk out of the Van Wickle Gates and into the streets of Providence, around which you’ve have strolled millions of times during the most prominent 4 years of their lives. Finals for you might be one of the last times you ever have to take an exam, possibly reflecting this as a bittersweet moment. You look forward to a summer filled with worldwide traveling and visiting friends and family from your hometowns. This could even be a more amazing summer than the summer you graduated from high school. However, you also start thinking about the people you won’t see when you leave the gates, which is a hard conclusion to comprehend. Some might centralize in New York, others on the West Coast, some in the graphic cities of Europe, and others might meet again in your five-year reunion.
All in all, each person at Brown has differing emotions about the end of the semester, depending on which stage of their Brown journey they find themselves in, with everyone seeming to have mixed feelings about the semester coming to an end.