I remember how exciting summer was when I was a kid. I would just be eagerly waiting for school to end so that I could fly to some exotic location with my family for the summer. Or hang out with my friends every day. Or just lay around in bed or read, paint, draw, basically do whatever.
What happened to that when I entered college?
While I definitely was counting down the days to summer, mainly because I was exhausted from the quarter and just wanted finals to end, I knew that this summer would not be full of family vacations and hanging out with my friends.
In college, summer is all about improving your resume and working on what you can do to get ahead, either in school or the job search. A lot of college students take multiple summer classes and have to deal with finals and homework all-year round. Other students study for tests like the MCAT, LSAT, and GRE, to name a few, so they're definitely not just chilling and partying.
In my case and several other students, we're working and/or interning at companies to get experience in the fields we want to pursue as well as funding our broke college bank accounts. A majority of us, including me, are back home with our parents as well, so it's much harder to go out with friends when we have to follow rules and curfews.
It is hard to squeeze in a family vacation when everyone has busy work schedules and working in different cities around the country. Even seeing your friends becomes tough. You don't get to see them every day between classes or have dinner or go out with them at night. You do the same "we really need to hang this summer!" and "I'm busy this week, how about next week?" cycle until summer ends.
Everyone's busy with their own thing and after work, you just want to catch up on sleep, watch some Netflix alone, or spend time with your family. Summer just isn't the same anymore but that's the consequence we face as we grow up and learn to be responsible, independent adults with budding careers.
In conclusion, summer is 13 weeks, which is about 5 weeks too long. It starts to feel like another quarter in school, but I'd honestly rather be studying in school than the same work grind every day and then doing nothing after it. I never realized how much I missed school and all the hell that came with it until summer came along. It's just too long of a break and disturbs my study schedule as well. I almost feel like I forgot everything about school, what classes I'm going to take, and the whole layout of my college campus.
Summer is great, but I've definitely gotten over it. Just wait till school comes along and I'll be talking about how I miss summer vacation so much.
