Everyone has that holiday countdown hung up somewhere in his or her room or on their phone. You are counting down the days until you get to go home and be with your family and not have to worry about school for a little bit.

You are so excited to get away from campus and go home to see your family and pets that you have not seen for months. All you can think about is hanging out with your friends every day and just being in your hometown again. You are enjoying the time with your family and friends and preparing for the holidays that are quickly approaching us.

I am sure that all of you can agree with me when I say that being at home and relaxing is so nice and all we want to do. It is like you have nothing to do when you go back to school. See, that is where you are wrong!

We all look forward to that one-week long break that we have for Thanksgiving and back to the hometown we all go to spend time with our loved ones — no school, your own bed, your own shower, snuggling with your dogs and having no worries whatsoever. You have not been home all semester and you are trying to enjoy every second of it. You think that the week is never going to end because you are so happy to be home.

You don’t have classes to attend every day, no alarms set for the weekdays, no homework, no chapter meetings for your sorority or fraternity, just a nice long relaxing week away from all that work that you have to get done.

Being a junior in college, this week always messes with me because it is a tease for that nice long one-month winter break we all have just a couple weeks after Thanksgiving break.

After your nice vacation away from school, as soon as you come back finals are beginning to approach you as well as a ton of work that professors are giving to wrap up the semester.

You start stressing out and wish that you can just go back home and enjoy that nice long stress- and work-free week that you just experienced not too long ago.

If you are one of those students planning on not completing any work over break and just relaxing, my advice to you is to keep up to date with your work and not get behind because we are at the end of the semester.

Those were the good old days, now back to reality you go.

Just think about it: you are that much closer to going home for a longer amount of time and getting to be with your family for the holidays.

Well, that is until you have to come back to school to begin the second semester of the school year…

Happy finals!