Expectations vs. Reality: Winterim
With Dartmouth’s winterim lasting an entire six weeks, most students create grand plans of productivity, fun activities and lofty goals. Despite our current ambitions, things don’t always go exactly as anticipated. With that said, Dartbeat has read your mind and also gazed into the future to create a week-by-week summary of what you plan to do for the winter break versus what actually happens.
Week 1
Plan: Attempt to reproduce FoCo cookies and once you get the recipe down you’ll share it with your hometown friends and family to show them what they’ve been missing
Actual: Either your cookies stick to the pan and taste even worse than Novack level…
OR
You never mustered the motivation to bake cookies anyway. Instead you buy some from Trader Joe’s, stick them on a plate from your kitchen (so they look homemade) and hand them out across town as you brag about your MasterChef skills.
Week 2
Plan: See all of your friends from high school and catch up on life!
Actual: You forgot that by the second week, all of them had to go back to school. But hey, it’s never too late too hit up your local high schooler?
Plan: Sleep in until 11 a.m. Every day.
Actual: Either you sleep until 4 p.m. OR you forget to close your blinds and you wind up waking up at 8 a.m. and can’t fall back asleep. You forget to do this multiple times. Why couldn’t this have happened the day you slept through your 10A?
Week 3
Plan: Get more educated about the upcoming presidential race
Actual: You come back home and realize just how stupid everyone else around you is when it comes to political knowledge. All of a sudden, the basic things you know make you feel like you actually took GOV 75 — we have an economy, ISIS is bad, Hillary Clinton is running for president. Wow, you’re already such an educated citizen.
Plan: Eat out at all the restaurants you’ve missed for the past 11 weeks.
Actual: This is one of the few things that actually WILL happen as planned. The plot twist though, is that you go out to these places fives times as often as you intended and you realize you’re already at the equivalent of -200 DBA by the end of week three.
Week 4
Plan: Buy a pong table so you can teach all your friends and then get enough practice so you can crush all the competition, come 16W.
Actual: You find out you have to go to a lumberyard to get a board custom-made for 5 x 10 feet and you concede to playing the lesser game of Beirut.
Week 5
Plan: Learn to play the guitar or get better at that musical instrument you played for one year in middle school because it was a requirement.
Actual: You master how to play C and G and realize some songs only require just those two chords! You are basically Jimi Hendrix.
OR
You play Guitar Hero until you get “Rock Star” status. Seriously, how old even is that game?
Plan: Take the alcohol.edu course so you can eventually graduate.
Actual: You probably remind yourself to do it on eight different occasions, but there are always more important things to do. Whether or not one of those “more important things” included consuming alcohol is beside the point.
Week 6
Plan: Only one week left! You tell yourself, you still have time to get notes from friend so you can pre-study for that tough course you have next term, take an online speed reading class and also find a book to read for pleasure.
Actual: You already know the actual results of this one. When you’re already drowning in week three of 16W, this is what you will say to yourself: