The Lessons I Should Have Learned Freshman Year But Didn’t Until Junior Year.

                                                 

            As the semester dwindles down, so do most students’ motivation levels. Whether it is raining, hailing, freezing cold, or gorgeous outside, students tend to find themselves finding reasons to skip their classes towards the end of the semester around finals.

            After a semester’s worth of work, it becomes really easy to let stress and procrastination take over and become unmotivated.  During my freshman year, when stress hit, I avoided all my work and spent 100 meal points at the convenience store and watched every season of Friends.

If you don’t want to be like how I was freshman year, you should realize that the keys to success during finals week is to keep stress and procrastination to a minimum level and stay motivated.  Your tests will be over before you know it, and you’ll get to go home and make questionable looking gingerbread houses and Instagram poorly constructed snowmen that you and your friends made.

            Until then, here are some key pointers on how to avoid the stress and procrastination, and not lose your drive before finals week.

·      Cut yourself off from all social media

 It’s so easy to find yourself on Facebook looking at someone’s pictures from 2008 when you’re avoiding doing your work. Also it's really easy to find yourself stalking your ex's new girlfriend Facebook, Instagram and Twitter account; I've been there and its a road that takes thirty to fourty-five minutes to travel.  However, there is a cure – deactivate your Facebook. You want to ensure there are no ways of you seeing pictures or updates of a party you’re missing out on. Stay focused on your studies – you’ll get your time to celebrate soon.

·      Hide in the library from everyone and everything

Trust me when I say that windows are your biggest enemy when it comes to studying. You’re going to find yourself analyzing the tree right next to you and you’re going to snap out of it and realize you did absolutely nothing for the past 45 minutes. Grab a huge coffee, go to a room with no windows, and get to work. It’s really hard to be unproductive in a place filled with people being productive.

·      Don’t spend all your time studying

The National College Health Assessment recently surveyed 17,000 college students around finals time and 15% of the students reported that they have “felt so depressed that it was difficult to function”. If you’re on a 24/7 study binge, your brain will suffer from information overload and you’ll find yourself stressed, depressed, and not well dressed. Write down a study plan and every two hours make “reward” breaks where you can put your mind at ease and go through Reddit or watch this week’s episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

         
You're going to be fine and everything is going to work out. Now get off of Elite Daily and stop taking Buzzfeed quizzes and go study for your exam that's in 7 hours. You got this.

The Reality of Luxury

Conversations of who killed themselves and who was getting divorced were thrown around like hello’s and goodbye’s.

That’s how it was being amongst the 1% of society on a remote island off of Massachussets.The women went to the local beaches drowning in Cartier love bracelets and Tory Burch accessories. The husbands flew in every weekend from various locations and only spoke of stock investments and home renovations.The children were drenched with overpriced sunscreen and were the poster children for brands such as Vineyard Vines, Ralph Lauren, and Lilly Pulitzer.

But me? I was no one. I was just a stranger getting a glimpse of this world with binoculars that I couldn’t afford.

Being a nanny to a family that was going through a divorce was one of the most eye-opening experiences thus far. By “eye-opening” I mean that I wouldn’t go as far as putting this summer job on my LinkedIn and talking about it future employers- I mean that it showed me everything I am and everything I don’t want to become.

I’m not going to sit behind this computer screen and tell you that being a nanny to a wealthy suburban family was the worst thing that has ever happened to me. No, a perk of this job was that I also got to experience the luxury that came with this lifestyle.

I got to go on boats, tan on private beaches and meet people who were CEO’s or founders of companies that I encounter on a daily basis.

Oh and my Instagram- It was filled with all of these things. My likes-per-minute ratio was out of control whenever I posted something. My pictures were adorned with comments ranging from “omg can I live your life” to “kk bye so jealous”.

However, I felt a sense of guilt whenever I posted any of these pictures and received all of these comments. I was getting all of this attention from people who thought that they wanted to live my life. They wanted to experience all of the good without feeling the backlash of the bad. You want to go on that boat that I was on 3 hours ago? Alright, sounds good, just make sure that you have at least two dads whose children you just put sunscreen on stare at you while you take off your bikini coverup. You want me to take you to that mansion with the pool I just Instagrammed? That's fine, just make sure that you first calm down the crying 7-year-old who just saw his dad slap his mom across the face for bringing up the fact that they are selling one of their properties during a dinner conversation with friends.

People want to live the life of luxury but they don’t realize the price that comes with it. I was the only one who knew the truth of these pictures and it felt as if I was lying to all 596 followers when I uploaded them. I was showing them what they wanted to see; the life they wanted to live but not the realities behind it. All they saw was a glamorous lifestyle based entirely around money, but what they weren’t seeing is that some people are so poor that all they have is money.