Taking advantage of free time

First semester ends the moment we finish our last final exam. Our professors can no longer assign us homework, we have no responsibilities and we won’t even see the inside of a lecture hall until the second Monday in January. The days when we were slaves to our classwork and banished ourselves to the library until all work was finished will be distant memories. We’ll be on break without a care in the world.
But perhaps not having a care in the world is a bad thing.

Don’t get me wrong, we deserve a break. But there’s a difference between taking a break and being a waste of air for three weeks straight.

During the semester, we are loaded with projects, exams and homework assignments. We have so many short-term responsibilities that we might forget about our long-term responsibilities. The ones that involve our lives post-IU.

We’ve had a lot on our plates this semester, and the thought of applying for an internship in the summer seems far less urgent than pounding out an eight-page paper that’s due tomorrow.

During winter break, we should be taking advantage of our “free time” and utilizing it the right way. We should be taking care of the business that we don’t necessarily have time to take care of during the semester and evaluating our ambitions.

According to USA Today, employers cut 533,000 jobs in November. The unemployment rate reached 6.7 percent, a 15-year high. It’s becoming increasingly hard to find a job, and if we’re not ambitious, soon some of us will be among the jobless after college.

In the interest of avoiding that nightmare, we should spend winter break being productive. We should be sending out resumes, networking, contacting prospective employers and making sure that after we graduate, we don’t regret the way we spent our free time during college.

Of course it’s important to use the time off to be with family and friends. But neglecting our futures in the interest of kicking back with friends from high school is a bad idea.

We can also benefit professionally from our time home with our old friends and family. They are our most valuable resource because they know us almost as well as we know ourselves. They were with us when we were dreaming our biggest dreams without the fear that our dreams were unrealistic. We can look to them and see ourselves as we were before college.

College can make us jaded sometimes, especially during finals week. We work our tails off trying to succeed and are often disappointed when our work doesn’t pay off the way we had hoped. We might even feel like time spent on schoolwork is a waste.

This winter break, let’s try to forget about our pessimistic attitudes toward school and attempt optimistic attitudes toward our futures. So get off the couch, stop poking that voodoo doll of your teachers and make this winter break a productive one.