For many students across the country, summer is coming to a close and school is soon to be back in session. This realization may bring up a variety of emotions to you, the reader, depending on your relationship with the educational system. But for me, I couldn't be more excited.

Summer is nice and all, but the prospect of returning to classes with assignments, deadlines and opportunities to learn being thrown in your face left and right? I mean, how could it get better than that? And don't get me started on the stationary: pens, pencils and composition books in every color of the rainbow. The Back to School section of your local Walmart looks like a herd of college bound elephants have trampled through it.

But what about the parts of school that don't shine so brightly? For myself to suggest that every individual approach their own situations with the same exact judgment is ludicrous. There are nuances and grey-areas to every story which send people in all sorts of directions.

Sometimes class is boring, sometimes Walmart is sold out of all the cute pencil cases and occasionally social situations end up taking precedence over your education. Maybe you just don't like learning. Maybe your school is underfunded and overflowing. School comes with problems. Life comes with problems. When school makes up most of your life it's not too surprising if school is made out as the problem.

This is called a "Back to School Survival Guide," but really it can be applied to a lot of things. When faced with a problem, be proactive to find some sort of solution. This could come by either taking steps to change the situation or by changing your judgment of the situation.

For example: Didn't get the grade you were hoping for on a test? Well you could:

1. Ask the teacher if you could re-take the test.

2. Work extra hard on future assignments to help raise your overall grade.

3. Decide that you are comfortable with the grade you got and move on.

4. Just feel bad about it.

5. Any combination of the above.

There are endless ways that you can interpret and respond to situations and deciding what the best combination for you, in the end, is up to yourself. Is there a right and wrong way to respond to any event? Perhaps — but beyond the right and wrong, or as the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche might put it, beyond the good and evil, "in the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare".

I am very excited to return to school.