6 Things You Should Do Before Leaving Campus For Winter Break

It is the end of the semester and for most college students, this is the last week you have to survive through before holiday break.

The only thing separating you from sitting at home in front of a Christmas tree sipping your mom’s hot cocoa is that last dreaded final. Your mind during finals week is chalk full of vocabulary you have to remember, term paper outlines you have to follow, and presentations you have to memorize.

That’s why it is easy for the trash to become a game of Jenga, your desk to be buried underneath textbooks and papers, and basically your whole dorm looking like you belong on the show Hoarders.

While it’s understandable that you need to focus on your finals, you also need to remember that you will be gone from your dorm for a couple of weeks and you don’t want to come back to a messy dorm.

Some things to think about before leaving campus for winter break:

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1. Clean your dorm.

You don’t need to go all Danny Tanner on the place, but it would be best to tidy things up before you leave. Vacuum the carpet, wipe down the tables and counters, pick up any trash lying around, and Febreeze the room. You’ll thank yourself when you come back to a nice looking dorm.

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2. Take out the trash.    

You don’t want to come back to a dorm smelling of rotting trash and find a colony of bugs living in your kitchen because you forgot to take it out. Find the time at the end of the week to take out all the trash in your dorm.

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3. Clean out your fridge.

This goes along with the tip above. You don’t want to come back after winter break and open your fridge to find questionable looking Chinese food that you forgot to eat. Before you leave, go through what’s in your fridge and throw out anything that is perishable or expired.

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4. Organize your desk.

If you are one of those people who rarely see the bottom of their desk during the semester or if your organizational skills during finals week faltered, it is a good idea to clean off some of the stuff on your desk.

Throw out anything you don’t need to keep and put the stuff you do in your drawers. You will be happy to start the new semester with a nice clean desk you can mess up again.

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5. Take home anything you don’t need next semester. 

As you are organizing your stuff and packing your bag to take home, see if there is anything you won’t need or use for the next semester. Might as well bring it home now and lessen your load when you move out in the spring.

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6. Turn off the heater.

Last, but not least, turn off your heater before you leave (or air conditioning, depending on where your college is located). Don’t be that person who wastes energy heating a dorm for weeks when you are not there. It’s a good habit to start now anyway because sooner or later it will start costing you to use it.