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Winter break is a great opportunity to rest and re-charge before the spring semester, but ³Ô¹Ï±¬ÁÏ students have a lot to miss when they leave campus!

1. The food

There’s an obvious appeal to home food, especially if your parents or siblings are masters in the kitchen, but there’s truly nothing like the food in the dining hall. And at school, you don’t need to listen to your mom bickering with your sister about whether or not the homemade salsa has enough jalapeno—the award-winning ³Ô¹Ï±¬ÁÏ chefs aren’t ones to bicker, and already know the perfect pepper-to-salsa ratio.

 

2. Freedom

There’s a lot to love about being home: spending time with family and friends, sleeping in your childhood bedroom and pondering how much you’ve changed, and getting out of bed at whatever time you see fit. Still, if you end up spending break back at your parents’ house, you might feel that prepubescent angst of yesteryear creep back into your mind. Your family just doesn’t understand you, your parents’ rules are cruel, even totalitarian, and everyone seems to have an insatiable need to voice their unique political opinion. The comfortable isolation of your residence hall starts to have a newfound appeal.

 

3. Access to amazing resources 

I really can’t harp on this one enough, because I’m constantly reminded of the dearth of creative resources at home. Not to diss my hometown library, but it just doesn’t have what the  has—stuff like computers fully-loaded with programs like Photoshop and Illustrator (perfect for digitally manipulating pictures of your friends to be later uploaded to social media) and projectors that you can rent out to watch movies from a recently-constructed blanket fort.

 

4. The gym

It’s hard to ring in the new year with resolutions to attain the demigod-status body, which you’ve been longing for since the seventh grade, without access to a gym—let alone one as decked-out as . The recently-renovated facility has a myriad of treadmills, ellipticals, and stationary bikes to help burn away any evidence of the caloric excess of the holidays. There’s also the weight room, where you can sweat away feelings of inadequacy and get ripped in the process, and the pool, where you can do laps, practice your dive, and/or do some log-rolling, which, yes, is a real thing that people do.

 

5. Saratoga weather

This one doesn’t so much apply to me because I live a tight two-hours from campus, but for the students that come from the farther regions of the country or abroad, winter in Saratoga can be a treat. Yeah, it’s cold, but it also makes for some beautiful landscapes and some spirited and snowy fun with friends. Every year there’s some snow-sculpture on the quad that reminds ³Ô¹Ï±¬ÁÏ students that creative thought not only matters, but also manifests in interesting and sometimes really strange ways.

 

6. Friends

Without a doubt, the people you befriend during your time at ³Ô¹Ï±¬ÁÏ represent the hardest thing to leave at the end of fall semester, and the best thing to come back to at the start of the spring. Whether it’s the people in the room down the hall, your friends from class, or even the familiar face of an RA, it’s always nice to know that by the time break ends, there’s someone to come back to. The feeling you get when coming back to campus is hard to articulate; it’s more than just having a fresh start, it’s also knowing that you have the next three months to spend—however you choose—with the people that make you happy. 

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Brian Allan '17 is the 2016 - 2017 student blogger in the office of Communications and Marketing. A double major in English and Spanish with a minor in meida and film studies, he has provided a unique student insight to life at ³Ô¹Ï±¬ÁÏ.