5 Things to Do During Christmas Break

Christmas Break is here and many students are scrambling to figure out how to spend it! This is an interesting time of year because by now you’re probably tired from working so hard during the semester, but you know you need to make the most of this time. How do you do that? Here are 5 tips to make sure you spend your break wisely.

1) Rest! Kobe Bryant offers sound advice when he says, “rest at the end.” Sure, you’re not quite at the end of your journey, but you are at the end of the semester. That means you can now take a few days off to catch up with life. Spend a full week hanging out with friends and family and not even thinking about being premed.

2) Shadow. Okay, enough resting, it’s time to get back at it. Just kidding (kinda…)! I’ve had premeds message me asking to shadow during the break. This is the perfect opportunity for you to connect with your local doc back home and let him or her know how your premed journey is going. While at it, ask if you can get a few shadowing hours in over the break.

3) Strengthen relationships with professors and potential rec letter writers. Everyone should take a few minutes to send their professors from the immediate past semester a nice thank you note. Also do the same for professors from older semesters. If you’re preparing to apply to medical school, send them your PreMed STAR profile using the share icon on your profile page and request your rec letter now. Don’t wait….go ahead and send the first request now.

4) Read a book. Choose one book that you’ve been longing to read and spend a few minutes every day simply enjoying it. And NO I’m not talking about Kaplan’s MCAT review! I mean a book for pleasure reading. The only caveat being if you are preparing for the MCAT, then you better be studying those books!

5) Prepare for next semester. Make sure your classes are all set, you’ll have your books ready to go, and you have a plan for extracurriculars. It shouldn’t take you long to do this preparation and it’s definitely worthwhile doing it during break prior to resuming classes.

Your break is time for you to do just that…take a break! Sneak in a few things from time to time, but the general idea should be to relax and enjoy yourself. When it’s time to resume classes, you want to be 110% ready to go!