If you have ever traveled outside of the country, you may be familiar with the stages of culture shock. To summarize, one who experiences culture shock generally starts feeling excited and high on energy, and continues to experience a rollercoaster-type range of emotions throughout their journey. These phases are known as The Honeymoon Period, Rejection, Regression and Isolation, and Adjustment and Adaptation.

Knowing this, I found that these stages can be compared pretty closely to something all of us college students know: the stages of the semester.

1. The Honeymoon Phase: In this phase, one feels joy and ready to discover what lies in store. This is also known as syllabus week. You graze over the syllabus, see all the homework assignments and projects that you'll be doing, and you nod your head in blissful naivety. Little do you know what's coming.

2. The Rejection Phase is when you start to feel anger and disillusionment. You remember how you felt during the Honeymoon Phase and you feel almost betrayed by those feelings that turned out to be false. What happened to those first weeks of the semester when we got out of class ten minutes early and didn't have any homework?

3. According to Dr. Mary Ann Bellini, the Regression and Isolation Phase can result in changes of behavior such as inappropriate anger over slight delays and minor frustrations, changes in sleep patterns, compulsive eating and/or drinking, irritability, poor concentration, and unexplainable crying. I think I can speak for everyone when I say midterms week on this one.

4. The last stage is Adjustment and Adaptation. Here we start to feel recovery and that we are starting to learn new skills. This would be the end of finals week, in which we realize that even those classes that we thought we learned nothing from still taught us something. Here we finally feel like we can re-grasp our lives and can adjust to reality again.

Until it starts all over again next semester.