Summer’s saying its last goodbyes, assignments are beginning to flooding your agenda, multiple trips to grab a coffee are desperately needed- welcome to the start of the semester! It’s an absolutely insane time of year, but it’s hands-down the most important. You’re making a routine and creating habits that you’ll keep for the rest of the year, and they can make a HUGE impact over the course of these next few months. Being on a new schedule (typically consisting of little extra time and energy) can wreak havoc on anything good that you might’ve had going before the semester kicked off. So, whether you’re an incoming freshman or a sophisticated senior, the beginning of the semester is the time that you need to pay attention to the most to get a good start and avoid the middle (and/or end) of the semester crash.
A few tips:
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Write it out. Grab some paper (maybe a small piece from your least favorite syllabus) and write a list of things you seriously, absolutely, 100% love doing that can be done while you’re around campus. Baking something amazing you saw on Pinterest, binge-watching every season of The Office, having an exclusive and spontaneous dance party with all the songs you know every word to- whatever it is, write it down and keep it for the tough days ahead, when you’ll need to take a break for an hour or two and remind yourself to have fun.
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Goals are made to be beat. Goals are great- goals for good grades, new friends, etc.- as long as you actually set them so they can be reached! Make goals for the semester so you have something to work for, but don’t make them too much like a New Year’s Resolution and drop them after the first month. Give yourself some grace and be reasonable!
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It’s not the little things. At the end of the day, this semester is just a small piece in the puzzle. Your schedule might be crazy, you might be running low on sleep and motivation, but it’s not the end! This semester is helping add up to the big picture of getting your degree, your job, and everything else that follows with that. Don’t focus on the little pebble, in the grand scheme of things, that this semester is; focus on your ambitions and the reason(s) why you need this semester for what’s ahead.
Those are three things I know you’ve heard or seen from somewhere, but apply them to your semester- save yourself from the crash and actually enjoy college for what it is!