With university exams at school across the country wrapping up for the term, many students will soon be coming home for the summer.
Now that exams are done, a new stressor has replaced tests and homework assignments: summer plans.
Of course, there is an initial period between exams and coming home that I like to call the ‘Golden period.’ When you’re like me and you go to school all the way across the country, coming home for the first time since December is really great.
For me, it means catching up with family, kissing all my pets, and seeing the mountains again.
New Brunswick is beautiful, but it lacks mountains in a big way – the tallest peak in New Brunswick, and all of the Maritimes, is 820 metres high.
Golden Ears is 1716 metres, and is nowhere near the highest peak in B.C. Needless to say, I missed the mountains.
However, my ‘Golden period’ of being excited about coming home is beginning to have a tinge of anxiety – what am I going to do until September?
In high school, summer was two months long, and even that felt like forever. Now I have four months all to myself, and absolutely no schoolwork to fill them.
What am I going to do?
I asked several of my friends what their plans were, and got two major groupings of responses.
Half of my friends said they were going to work full-time over the summer, pending being able to find jobs. Some plan on working retail, others in seasonal industries, such as fishing or tourism, but all said that summer was the time they use to make money to save for school, and to live off of the rest of the year while they were studying.
The rest of my friends had other plans. Some still planned on working, but only part-time or for part of the summer. These friends wanted to find something more recreational to do with their time, such as swim, or learn a new hobby.
I find myself in this second group.
I work year-round, but not full-time. That means I’m still going to have a tonne of time on my hands with school out of the picture, so I made a list of things that might be interesting or fun.
I want to spend more time up at Alouette Lake once the weather gets nice (which won’t be too long, at least for me, because I’ve become so acclimatized to New Brunswick I’ve started saying ‘it’s warm out’ if the thermometer gets anywhere above five degrees.)
I also want to keep running, which is something I discovered a love for at university.
I want to paint, read, and continue my studies in Latin.
My list is long.
Between all of that, work, possibly learning to drive, and work, I should be plenty entertained over the summer.
And really, it will be nice to be home in the mountains again.
There are plenty of things to do in the summer. Right now, all there is to do is wait for summer to begin.
See you in May.
Marlowe Evans is a student at the University of New Brunswick
from Maple Ridge who
writes about youth issues.