October is kind of an ironic month to be a college student. On social media, fall looks like one of the best times of the year. Everyone goes to pumpkin patches, buys new sweaters, looks for Halloween costumes, gets seasonal drinks, and rewatches shows like “Gilmore Girls.” Everything about the season makes it feel like we should slow down and enjoy ourselves. Meanwhile, most college students are doing the exact opposite. By October, the excitement of starting a new semester has mostly worn off. The new notebooks aren’t really new anymore, the schedule you promised yourself you would follow has probably fallen apart at least once, and assignments that seemed far away in September are suddenly due. This is usually when the semester starts to feel like a drag.
A study by Junsang Park and Sarah K. Lipson, published online in July in the Journal of Affective Disorders, analyzed depression and anxiety scores from more than 650,000 college students across seven academic years. The researchers found that symptoms generally increased as semesters progressed, with larger fluctuations in fall than in spring. Fall symptoms peaked around weeks 11 and 12. To be clear, there is a difference between being exhausted from school and actually struggling with depression or anxiety. Feeling unmotivated for a few days because you have three assignments due is not the same as consistently feeling unlike yourself. Resources are available at Counseling Prevention Services at the university, on the 3rd floor of the student center.
For the normal mid-semester slump, college can easily turn into a cycle of waiting: you wait for Friday, then the next break, then midterms to be over, then Thanksgiving, and finally finals. Eventually, after all that waiting, you realize you have spent half of the semester waiting for it to end. That is why I think this time of year is the perfect excuse to romanticize your life a little. This doesn’t mean you need to buy an expensive coffee every single morning or completely ignore your schoolwork in the name of “self-care.”
Sometimes it is just finding small things during the week that make you excited to get through the day. Start looking for your Halloween costume now! Halloween is basically tomorrow, but even if you have no idea what you want to be, scrolling through Pinterest with your friends can at least give you something fun to talk about besides whatever assignment is due next. Get coffee with your friends between classes instead of immediately going back to your room. Try one of the fall drinks you have seen online or at Parson’s. Bring your laptop and pretend you are going to be productive, even if half the time is spent talking; you might even get some work done. Go to a pumpkin patch or an apple orchard one weekend. Take the cliché pictures, buy cider donuts, and pick out a pumpkin that will probably sit by your door until it starts looking questionable.
People come back to the same fall activities every year for a reason: they are fun, and sometimes that is reason enough to make time for them. One of the easiest traps to fall into in college is convincing yourself you cannot do anything enjoyable until all your work is finished. There is always another assignment, reading, discussion post, exam, or paper coming up. If you wait until your entire to-do list is empty before permitting yourself to do something fun, you may be waiting until winter break. Instead, try putting something small into the middle of your week that gives you a reason to look forward to it. Get coffee with a friend on a Tuesday, wear the outfit you have been saving even if you are only going to class, or watch a Halloween movie with your roommates once you are done with your work for the night.
Not everything you do has to have a bigger purpose; sometimes breaking up your routine is enough to make life feel a little less repetitive. Coming from someone in their final semesters, college goes by ridiculously fast, and eventually there will be a fall when you are no longer walking across campus to class, trying to figure out a Halloween costume with your friends or attempting to coordinate everyone’s schedules just to find one Saturday where you can all go apple picking. You might as well enjoy those things while you are here. Your assignments will still be there when you get back, but at least you will have something else to remember from the semester besides them.
