Cure Your Winter-break Hangover

For some students, the holiday break is a time for great accomplishment -- they make some dough while working their asses off, take an enriching winter class (easy A, cough-cough) or teach Chinese orphans how to skip rope.

Then there’s the rest of us, who use break as a time to kick back, relax and ... yeah, that’s about it. Exams are done, high school buds are around, the holidays are around the corner -- what could be better?

Yeah, all that magical delusion lasts about two weeks. It’s the life. Until boredom sets in like a black hole and you sink deeper and deeper into your couch as if it were a giant puddle of quicksand. Personally, I’m an expert at this. But you’ve gotta get back in school-mode somehow, so I’ve come up with three ways for you to kick-start digging yourself out of the couch. …

1. Get Pumped for Rush. Even if you aren’t sure about pledging a fraternity or sorority, rush is still a must-do while you’re at college. For guys it’s a blast, for girls it’s a bit dull -- but the roles reverse come pledging. If you’re already a member of a frat/srat, then look forward to the new pledges that will soon populate the house.

Of course, if your rush season already happened in the fall, don’t worry. You can bet everyone’s going to make up for lost time and be ready to party hard.

2. Road Trip! A lot of times, we make empty promises to catch up with college friends over break and it never happens -- remember that black-hole business? It’s easy enough to see high school friends or people from college who live close by, but where’s the adventure in that?

Time to gas up the car, pack your things and hit the road. Meet up with some friends at the beach, or go skiing with a couple of people in the mountains ... and get lost eight times along the way. Or, if you have good friends at other colleges who go back before you do, visit them while they’ve got nothing going on. That will definitely put you in the mood to go back.

3. Write Stuff Down. One of my biggest regrets from my first few years is not keeping track of all the shenanigans my friends and I have gotten into. There are still a ton of awesome memories, of course, but what about those random, crazy nights from freshman and sophomore years?

Maybe part of the beauty is that you’ll never really remember exactly what went down, but I’d like to look back on The Night of The Stolen Street Sign -- or the time we went to get food at 4 a.m., or that one horrific night from pledging -- and laugh about every detail that happened. So start a journal or blog to get pumped for a new semester with new memories.