Spring Break: Refresh Yourself

By Tam Warner Minton, M.S.
College Adventures LLC
Dallas, Texas
www.collegeadventures.net

You have spent the last four years preparing for college.  You’ve taken all the right courses, at least a few AP classes, and filled your resume with community service and interesting activities.  Your parents have taken you to visit colleges, you have spent summers enhancing your college application by building homes for Habitat or going on mission trips or attending summer academic programs.  You have written countless essays, requested recommendations, and completed applications.  The last four years have culminated in several college applications which have been submitted and are, at this moment, in the hands of admission committees around the country.  Now, you wait.  You are waiting for those admission letters, and you may have even received a few responses, but for most of them, you are waiting.  This is time for you to take a break.

Your senior year spring break should ideally be spent doing what YOU want to do!  Don’t you deserve it for all the hard work you have put in?  Take a deep breath and think about a week, a week of doing whatever you feel like doing.  You don’t have to go out of town, to the beach, or on a fabulous ski trip.  You can lie in the grass in your backyard watching the buds come out on tree limbs, you can read a good book, you can catch up on all the episodes of Heroes that you TiVo’d because you were too busy to watch them, or you can go have an ice cream cone (or two?) at your favorite ice cream parlor.  Take it easy or go dancing, but use your break to reflect on what you have accomplished, and dream about what you will do in the future.  Just a couple of months and you will be a high school graduate!  This is a momentous time in your life, you are reaching a milestone.  My advice?  During this spring break breathe deeply, enjoy yourself, and live fully in the present.  The future will be here soon enough.