Fall break is right around the corner and it couldn’t come any quicker, no matter how much we may want it to.
When I was a freshman, I didn’t really enjoy fall break that much because I was bored for a majority of it.
Most of my friends from home were away at college and I looked forward to coming back to school to be around more people.
Now I love it because break is one time out of the year where I don’t have to worry about going to class.
Recently I’ve been stressing out because I’m worried about what I’m going to do with the rest of my life after I graduate; all of the questions I’m getting make me feel like I have to decide right now.
I asked a couple of recent graduates and family members the best way to go about deciding this, and they’ve all been pretty helpful in giving me advice.
One thing has been consistently said across the board: Enjoy your time in college. If I could go back, I would.
My response was usually, “How am I supposed to enjoy myself when I have a mile long list of things that I need to do that needed to be done yesterday?” But looking at it from a broader picture, I see their point.
Once we graduate, if most of us aren’t already worrying about it now, we are going to have to worry about going to work at least five days a week, paying bills, student loans, saving up for retirement, marriage, kids, and so many other things that we don’t need to worry about right now.
Sure we have plenty of other responsibilities, but hopefully the ones we have now are a bit less expensive.
So this fall break, while many of you may want to study or get ahead on homework, I encourage all of you, from freshman to senior, to just relax and do virtually nothing.
Unless you’re going to be a teacher, college is probably the only time you’ll be allowed to have any sort of break from your workflow, so take advantage of it while you can.
Spend time with your family, see some old friends, take the dog for a walk, binge-watch a series on Netflix or do whatever it is you need to do to relax.
Sure, you might have to help clean around the house because your parents are “letting you live here and not charging you rent so the least you could do is load the dishwasher.” But doing a couple of chores doesn’t amount nearly to everything else you have to do during the year here.
So my final words to you are be safe, have fun and enjoy your fall break.
KHADIJA DJELLOULI
