Nobody likes coming back from Christmas break. Everyone is coming off of the holiday season, the most wonderful time of the year.

With this return to campus comes the reminder that you’re broke and it’s a long time before someone gives you gifts again. New Year’s has passed and so has enough time for you to give up on your New Year’s resolution.

It’s the new year, second semester, and the same you. You’re either a freshman going through your first winter break hangover, or you’re another undergrad student who has experience it before and knows how tiring it can be.

As a student who has struggled with winter break hangover before, I set out to talk to other students about how they cope with the worst parts of it.

How do you deal with the cold weather?

Kyle Barrett, an occupational therapy student at AIC, said, “you could always just not go to class and stay in your dorm room or your house where it should be warm.”

As for the potential negative effect that could have on your grades, he said, “Well you just have to prioritize your body temperature and your academic performance. If you get to cold, you could die, I know that as a health science student. Failing a class will never kill you.”

These were all very astute observations.

For freshmen particularly, how do you try to make second semester matchup to first semester, which was so exciting just because everything is new?

Sanal Alexander, a physical therapy student at AIC, shared her thoughts.

“The best thing to do is just to have a really bad first semester. Don’t go out, don’t socialize, just stay in your room and eat junk food and watch Netflix. Then if you go out just once in second semester, it’s guaranteed to be better than your first,” Alexander said.

This seemed like fair advice, but it might be a little late for most students, no?
“Well, hindsight is always 20/20,” Alexander said. “In college you really just have to learn to be ahead of the game and always planning for the future. If you didn’t know that having an awful first semester was a key to having a better second one, then you’re just setting yourself up for failure.”

Sadly, I didn’t have this hindsight my freshman year so I had to deal with a subpar second semester. Fortunately, I made it out alive.

My roommate transferred, what do I do now?

For this question, I went to someone who experienced this firsthand in Jonathan Murray, Vice President of the student body and an occupational therapy student at AIC.

“Well the first thing you should do is not be such a terrible roommate that it forces your roommate to transfer, unless of course you were intentionally a terrible roommate to get rid of your roommate,” he said.

I asked Murray which category he fell into and he declined to comment.

Regardless, it’s too late for most students in this situation as their roommate is already gone. So what are the options?

“You should just buy out the rest of the room,” Murray said, “that’s what I did and then from there you just have like a mini bachelor pad but it’s even worse because you’re in a college dorm. For men aged 18-20 this is just the dream.”

But what if you can’t buy out the room?

“Then learn from your mistakes,” said Murray. “Assess your next roommate, is he terrible? Does he get upset when you steal his food and make him pay all the fines? Then behave poorly and force him to transfer. Or is he a good roommate who just lets you get away with whatever you want in the room? If so, then do everything you can to keep him because those roommates are truly rare.”

There you have it fellow AIC students, the best way to attack all the regular second semester issues.

*Yes, this is satire, but I did interview my friends and they helped come up with the satirical quotes to support the piece. Being the first edition of the semester I figured some comedy might help to lighten the mood.