With my first year of college complete and the stress of finals no longer dictating my life, I felt very ready to return home to California in order to enjoy my summer vacation. But I realized very quickly that I was a bit lost. I didn’t have any internships or jobs lined up and none of my friends were done with school because Dickinson gets out almost a month before all of the West Coast schools. My parents work during the week and my brothers decided to do summer school so it’s just me at home. Top it off with the fact that my boyfriend and all of my college friends are on the East Coast and I won’t see them for the next three months.

The first week back was great because I had time to catch up on sleep and relax a bit. It’s always weird coming back to your room that you haven’t been living in for the past year, and it takes a while to settle into your home routine. Eventually, you hit a point when watching "Grey’s Anatomy" all day, for seven days in a row, becomes a bit tedious. You start craving human interaction and sunlight. Your parents come home and find you right where they left you, and you start feeling a bit inadequate since you traded your busy student life for a life of no plans at all. You become stuck in a very interesting predicament as it becomes way too much effort to change out of your pajamas and put on some deodorant. It’s also hard to be motivated when June gloom hits, and suddenly all outside events lose appeal.

Now that you’ve established that you’re unhappy just sitting at home doing nothing, you try to make something of your valuable abundance of free time. You start applying to any job you can, and you throw in a bit of praying with the hope that something will come along that will allow you some fun time on the side.

Then, the struggle continues as every job you apply for tells you that they can’t hire you because the time it will take to train you will not be worth it. Who wants to hire someone who can only work for three months? Not to mention that I’m taking a week to vacation with my family and I have to keep weekends somewhat flexible because I volunteer to coach soccer -- I totally understand. I’m not exactly the ideal hire. But, but c’mon! Invest in me because I’m a cool person. Pretty please? I’ll come back and work during breaks in the school year and in the following summers.

Anyways, as the search continues to find something to do with my summer I have one piece of advice for you. Plan something for your summer. It is valuable free time and with that time comes possibility. Just don’t waste a couple of weeks or more (fingers crossed it won’t be that many more for me) trying to figure out what that possibility is.