“Lazy Boy On Campus” is a weekly column on how to embrace laziness while maintaining a jam packed schedule. Easy, right?
This week’s Lazy Boy on Campus will give you tips on how to have a relaxing break while also remaining productive and starting new habits. (Christopher Sacco/The Daily Campus)
Welcome to the special “almost finals/winter break” edition of Lazy Boy on Campus. Isn’t it terrifying how close to finals we actually are? This semester seems to have just zoomed on by without anyone noticing. It seems like just yesterday we were taking our first exams of the semester. Most of you will hate me for saying this, but in just five-ish days we will all be taking our final exams. Yet there is a small silver lining. In around seven days, a very large chunk of you guys will be done with your exams, which means you can finally enjoy your well-deserved time off.
But with all of that a larger questions looms: how will you survive finals? For some of you out there, this is your first time taking finals. And no, AP exams do not count as relevant experience. By now you’ve probably figured out that preparing for a college level exam is much harder than anything in high school. Also remember that AP courses are mostly for entry level courses and you get to learn all of that stuff over the course of year. Here you only have a semester.
I, however, am not going to focus on studying and being lazy. I tackled that a few months ago in a column about midterms. The advice is the same. You know how much work you need to put in to make sure that you understand what you are learning about. It’s also up to you to figure how lazy you can be. It’s easy to procrastinate but just make sure you aren’t putting off the studying for the most important exams. After all, we are all preparing for our futures, so make sure that you prepare well for your exams.
Sidebar aside, the real reason for this column is to talk about being lazy over winter break. I’m sure that everyone has been pumped thinking about winter break. Unlike Thanksgiving and Spring break you don’t have to come back right away. You have a good four to five weeks off. You also don’t have to suspend any assignments. Everything will be completely over with when you leave. After break you can come back to school with a clean slate. During your time at home you can be lazy as you want. You can sleep in and you can go to bed late, or early if you want.
But all of that laziness should be taken with a grain of salt. Over the past semester, you have conditioned yourself to live a certain way. You’ve figured how to balance work and being lazy. You don’t want to re-learn all of that over every semester.
Instead, you need to find a way to fill in the gaps that you would normally occupy with school work and class. I’m not encouraging you to fill it with more work and I’m certainly not saying that you should give yourself no downtime, but maybe consider adapting what you would normally do for downtime.
A lot us spend all of our days in front of the television or the computer while on break. Why not try something a little different? Maybe go out for dinner with a friend you haven’t talked to in a while, or go somewhere that you’ve always wanted to visit. Break is great time for small road trips. Have a hobby that you could never find time to pursue or even start during the semester? You have nothing but time during winter break. Why not explore and try something new on your time off?
Winter break is a time for all of us to recuperate after a long, trying semester. That doesn’t mean, however, that you need to be so lazy that you forget how to balance being lazy and being a student. Also your parent’s might appreciate it if you aren’t on your computer the whole time. Seriously.
And with that, Lazy Boy on Campus is done for 2016. Good luck with finals and have a great break!
Amar Batra is a senior staff photographer and opinion’s staff columnist for The Daily Campus. He can be reached via email amar.batra@uconn.edu. He tweets at @amar_batra19.