Welcome back! As a current PhD student who also received his BA and MA degrees from A&M, I’ve seen more than my fair share of Januarys in College Station. Hopefully your time away from classes helped you feel recharged and reinvigorated. During holidays, I typically regain that positive outlook that I lost somewhere along the way in between midterms and finals.  Ready to attack my new set of classes and projects with enthusiasm, I find myself happy to be back on campus. This positive feeling I’m describing isn’t always a matter of temperament though; the start of each semester can be looked as an exciting fresh start or just another academic period we’re meant to dismally slog through. As with most things in life, our attitude makes all the difference. With that in mind, here are a few things I’m going to try to attempt this semester to help make it a bright spot in my future reminiscing:
 

• Cut back on something you know isn’t healthy. You don’t have to necessarily eliminated something altogether, just reduce your exposure. This makes the goal more attainable and can help prevent abandoning the task outright when a backsliding moment occurs. For example, my two vices are sugary foods and social media. Cutting back is not going to be fun - I’m solidly addicted to both cookies and Twitter. That said, I’ll be healthier with less of both of them in my life.
• Add something new and beneficial to your life. A popular New Year’s resolution is to start a new physical fitness plan, but this could be anything really. Take up a relaxing hobby, go try some new restaurants, play rec sports, start wearing a fedora (to prevent melanoma, of course). As graduate students, self-care is something immensely important to your health. Find something that takes your mind off of your work and your nose off of the grindstone. Personally, I’ll be getting back into a sport I’ve always loved but in a new way – officiating.
• Maximize your “work” time. To make the previous suggestion feasible, you may need to start here. Be disciplined when you’re working or studying. Turn off your notifications and close the browser tabs that distract you. Set a work timer for 15 minutes and see if you can stay on-task that entire time. Up the time period as you get better about staying focused. As you begin to get more done during your work and study times, you’ll gain time to pursue some of those “extras” mentioned previously.
• Try to engage with some new people and deepen established relationships. Graduate student life can be very isolating, but if you take some initiative you can find some kindred souls who are often very sympathetic to your current situation. Take a break from work and study (after the timer has gone off) and walk down the hall. Say hello to another student or faculty member and ask them about their life outside of their work. Leave your office door open or even take your headphones off for a bit so that others feel like they can engage with you. As a natural introvert, this is going to be a tough one for me, but I’m going to open my office door right now.
• Lastly, embrace your eccentricities. We all have things that we think make us a little odd. The truth of the matter is that those things don’t make us odd, they make us who we are. For instance, if you look at my desk and bookshelf, you’ll find the normal grad student clutter of books, papers and sticky notes, but you’ll also see my LEGO sets. Be you.

 
I hope you all have an amazing semester. Good luck in all your endeavors and adventures this spring. Feel free to let me know how things are going for you in the comments.