You were just getting the hang of things at college when, out of the blue, winter break hit. And now you have no choice but to leave your perfect bubble of academic happiness and productivity only to be shoved back into an environment where old habits are easy to remember and new ones are hard to maintain.
What can you do?
Awareness is half the battle. You know how you feel about this brief interruption to your new life, and you have an idea of what to expect in terms of how this break could affect you. The question is, how can you use this awareness to have a say in the way it turns out this year?
Take School with You
This is a very unpopular view right now. We all cherish the phrase “work-life balance”, and students certainly have a right to the concept of “school-life balance”. But here’s a question for you: why is your school-life balance something you feel you need a break from? Is it really balanced at that point? Or are you operating in a way that is pulling you down as the semester goes by to the point that you really need a break halfway through the school year?
Get help with time management and creating a good school-life balance.
If you have a truly balanced academic life that brings you meaning and fulfillment (and why would you not want that?), then brining that life home for the holidays can be a great opportunity to study what you want for a few weeks and experiment with how your experience at college can intersect with your time back home.