There comes a point in the spring semester when you’re no longer hyper-aware of how you’re being perceived, when your reputation feels a little less fragile than it did in the fall. As we enter the last few weeks of the school year, many students, especially us first-years, have had similar experiences: a potentially tanked GPA, an awkward talking stage, a failed situationship and a probable rejection from a summer internship (but every company just ghosts you).
Like the fall semester, spring is an anxious period — prelims, finals, the creeping realization that the semester is wrapping up — but socially and academically, we’ve already lived through all of the first-year horror stories everyone warns you about.
Now feels like the time — unlike winter break, when we swear to follow through on a long list of resolutions — to set a few manageable goals for ourselves. Without the looming pressure of the new year ahead of us, there’s a small space to think about how we want to finish out the academic year and head into summer: back home, abroad or wherever we may be. Either way, it feels like yet another new chapter — and it is. And the weather encourages a bit more reflection.
In Ithaca’s chilling winter, it often feels like you’re stuck in place. When it’s drab and gray, day in and day out, life can start to feel a bit like The Truman Show, as though you’re caught in a never-ending cycle of 10:10 a.m. lectures, dining hall runs, the occasional Helen Newman visit and, if you’re feeling adventurous, maybe a Wednesday night fishbowl in seven-degree weather.
Winter has a way of placing me in a loop, where social or academic situations sit heavily on my mind, and the freezing dreariness does nothing but reflect how I’m feeling. But as the sun is starting to make an appearance more frequently, the motivation to get outside — to restore our long-lost vitamin D — is brewing. Along with it comes the urge to refresh our minds.
Walking to class every morning is no longer an experience where I must first brace myself for numb fingers and harsh winds. It’s now a breather: a moment of fresh air before my academic routine begins, a chance to clear my mind after a night’s rest and reset before the day ahead, without worrying too much about what’s already happened and instead looking forward.
Spring feels like a ‘soft’ reset, compared to the New Year’s pressure to hard reset — the attempt to fix every anxiety or embarrassment from the fall semester all at once. Spring doesn’t demand that we completely reinvent ourselves with ambiguous goals that are unlikely to stick.
For me, there’s also the strange illusion of productivity that comes when I’m simply doing schoolwork outside in the sun. Perhaps the whole ‘fake it till you make it’ idea is true — sometimes that’s exactly how a new routine begins. And of course, we can always question whether we’re actually happier in the spring or just more distracted — by classes, friends, extracurriculars or merely the sun’s presence.
So, maybe it is a distraction. But it could also just be us trying to make the most of the final stretch of the semester before parting ways with campus, now that we’ve finally settled in.
Either way, spring feels like the optimal time to take a few risks. After all, we’re leaving in less than a month anyway. So I’m choosing to, or at least trying, not to worry so much about everything before summer break. Maybe a ‘soft reset’ looks less like reinventing yourself and more like small, intentional shifts — grabbing coffee with someone new, going to the office hours you’ve been avoiding since January or perhaps letting an awkward moment from February stay in February rather than carrying it with you. It’s realizing whatever version of you people may have formed over the school year isn’t fixed; there’s still room to feel different within yourself. We’re not stuck in a static loop, and regardless, campus always seems to have little ways to embrace the day — whether that's studying on the Arts Quad, walking around Beebe Lake, watching the sunset on Libe Slope or simply sitting in the sun a little longer than planned.
Savannah Sandhaus is a first-year in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is a staff writer for the Lifestyle department and can be reached at ssandhaus@cornellsun.com.
