5 Ways To Prepare For Spring Semester Right Now

By Alexandra Brown on January 9, 2015

image via Tom Jutte on flickr.com

Winter break usually lasts us college students anywhere from three weeks to a full month. That is a lot of time being spent at home, with little to no responsibility.

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You might have a job lined up to pass the time while making some extra cash, you might be traveling abroad for a winter program, or you might just be kicking back, visiting with friends and family you don’t otherwise get to see very often, and enjoying yourself.

In between everything you have going on, you can always make some time to prepare for spring semester before it creeps up on you out of nowhere, and you’ve barely gotten anything ready for your next academic semester.

Here are five ways you can get going and prepare for spring semester, right now while on break.

1. Buying textbooks

You pretty much know you’re most likely going to need textbooks for all of your classes, so why not get going on purchasing those now, and save yourself the stress during syllabus week?

Look up each course you will be taking on your school’s website, and see which textbooks are required for the courses. Search for the best deals for these online, either on amazon.com or another site you know of, and buy them. As for “recommended texts,” you should probably wait until you go to the class so as to save money if the professor decides the texts aren’t worth purchasing.

You can do all of this from a laptop, and it really relieves a lot of stress you would have to deal with upon returning to school. There’s no reason why you can’t knock this off your checklist, and even in the comfort of your own house.

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2. Planning your schedule

Before returning to school after a long break, it’s probably a good idea to have a sense of what your schedule will look like for the next semester.

Look up your schedule on your school’s website, including what classes you will be taking, at what times, and in which buildings, and organize yourself. This could mean adding the classes into your calendar on your phone or laptop, or physically writing them into a planner.

Also, if you’re a first year student, it’s probably a good idea to make sure you know where all of your class buildings are located.

It’s always helpful to feel like you’re prepared for what is to come, especially concerning academics. Researching and planning out next semester’s schedule can also help to relieve anxiety about the upcoming semester.

https://www.madison.k12.wi.us/calendars

3. Keeping up with extra curricular activities

If you are a member of an honor society, a sports team, an academic or social club, the campus newspaper, or something else, try to keep up with events that are being held, meetings to be attended upon return from break, or other happenings involving members.

This would entail following up with emails sent out by club/organization leaders, or reaching out to these groups if you’re interested in a position that you haven’t held before. It could also mean reaching out to certain leaders of new clubs that you’re interested in joining for spring semester.

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4. Keeping up with apartment/off campus housing matters

If you’re an upperclassman and live in off campus housing, it may be a good idea to make sure over break that everything is fine and ready for when you return.

This might mean you have to reach out to your landlord, or other neighbors or friends in your hall to assure that everything will be taken care of upon your arrival back to campus.

You’ll probably want to have next month’s rent check ready to bring back with you, and you’ll also most likely want to start preparing for packing for back to school. You could make a list of what you will want to bring back to campus, what will stay at home, and a list of what is already there, to avoid confusion.

This might sound like tedious work, but being organized is important, and getting this done now while you’re probably not doing much else is definitely a time saver.

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5. Completing study abroad/summer internship applications

The last thing you could get ahead on over this lengthy break is the application process for summer internships, and even study abroad for the following semester, if you’re planning on something like that.

Use this break to research different summer job/internship opportunities, and get started on study abroad applications that often contain a lot of different parts, like personal essays, letters of recommendation, and verifications of travel documents.

You won’t want to be doing this stuff once the semester kicks off, and you’re probably getting bored at home, so start now and get ahead. You won’t regret it.

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