It’s a great monday morning at your home while you sip on coffee and slowly eat your breakfast. Your parents are off at work and you are watching whatever garbage television is on this early in the morning but there is something not quite right. What is that sound? That loud, repeated buzzing that is bouncing around the walls of your bedroom. Yeah, that’s your alarm going off at seven in the morning. It’s the first day back from winter break and you have an eight a.m. You have that major headache from waking up three hours after you fell asleep that morning.

Coming back to school after having the freedom to make your own schedule for a month is an extremely difficult endeavor. Your classes have changed, the temperature has dipped dramatically and you have to wake up even earlier than last semester. Even your opinions editor has changed! The first week of classes is always the most annoying when you have to be in every class. Syllabus week is when you and the students around you get to figure out just how much work you will be saving until the last minute.

Trying to transition back into a schedule with upwards of 15 hours of classes, along with part-time jobs and internships, after being free to coast through the month of December can bring a great strain on your stress level. I am not one of those people that can seamlessly fit back into a system. My approach to a new semester has been the same since Fall 2012. The first few weeks I stay conscious in my courses just enough to get the attendance credit. Then as assignment deadlines start to inch closer, I write them down in a notebook that I will forget about. Finally as I am a few days from my deadlines, I begin the assignments and finish work, that should be done in a week, in two days.

This semester, at least for the first two weeks, each of us will be setting three or four alarms to ensure that we actually wake up, printing our schedule out and putting it in the front of binders, and saving our classes into our phone calendar. I suggest that we all do something differently this semester. What that something might be, is entirely up to you but I believe that this year something needs to change. My personal plan is to establish a routine early on in the first week of classes. That means waking up early to make breakfast, workout, study or whatever the case may be.

The major issue, I think, that is killing us as students coming back is not establishing long-term goals at the beginning of the semester. This has a massive impact on how quickly you can get back into the swing of things on campus. By setting goals, you are telling yourself that you are going to ensure that you have better attendance, get better grades, and make a positive impact on campus.

As students, we all know the struggle of leaving the comfort of our beds to endure the ever changing weather that plagues Statesboro. With the weather dropping to near freezing temperatures, it is hard to find any drive to get back on track with classes. But what we should always remember when we look at ourselves in the mirror in the morning is #newyearnewme. Bundle up Eagles, it’s gonna be a long one.