April's Fool

"Oh crap! I need to look for a job." How many times have we said that every April?

I've come to love Aprils a lot since starting university. When I was in high school, I thought that university students were the luckiest people to have four months of summer. While I do think 10 months of school for grade school is too much, ending a couple months earlier for post-secondary isn't as wonderful as I thought it'd be.

I think that there are things that I like and dislike about both grade school and university. The biggest thing for me is work ethic. Throughout grades 1 to 12, we were consistently held accountable to do our homework every day. Most of the time, the homework was about repitition and that sort of stuff. I mean, how many nights did we have trying to do 50 math questions of just trying to find out what 'X' is? It was tedious, but it kept us on a consistent working level. We'd get assigned certain homework, and then we'd go home and do it the day it's assigned because we know it's due the next day or a couple days after that. Well, maybe this type of repetitiveness is still the case for a lot of people, depending on what field of study you're in, but I'd say the drives are a little different.

In university, I've no one to tell me to do my work except for myself and the deadline that is laid out on the syllabus. I have quickly found out how little self-motivation I have. At the beginning of each semester, I get handed a different syllabus for each class that I take, and that's about it. All the due dates are usually on there, and all that really happens after is the teaching or whatever that you get in class. Maybe I'm just terrible at managing a calendar that tells me all the things I need to do, but I usually just overlook these due dates most of the time, and sometimes even realize too late when something is due soon.

So by April, I'm kind of glad that I don't have to be disappointed in myself for procrastinating like crazy anymore. Especially with this year, I only have two days of classes left and then a couple exams over the next week, and I'll be done yet another year! I don't know if it's some kind of disease or allergy, but whenever I realize I have to complete some assignment, a huge sense of resentment just washes over me. Laziness FTL?

Then comes the summer part of the year. I've also come to think that four months of summer is too long. LOL. Over the last couple years, by the time I've realized that I need to be working as much as I can to earn as much as I can to pay off next year's school fees, it's usually well into May or even the beginning of June. For example, by the end of May last year, I was already sick of my job at the golf course. Somehow, I managed to chug along the next two and a half months until I got to coach a couple weeks of soccer camp in August and going to Vancouver for a couple weeks to finish off the summer.

Now that April has arrived again, who's going to be the fool that just looks at it as "another April"? Life probably gets stale really quickly if we just do what I've been doing. Good thing that's going to change for me this year, in that I'll be heading to an internship in the middle of May. As much as I don't want it right now, I know it'll be good for me.

You should try it! Don't look at this as just another end to a school year where you have to go find a job to earn money. Even if that is the case, do it with freshness. Try to put yourself in a position where you have to adjust to something new rather than just going back to that same retail job or serving in a restaurant. This isn't just another April. This April is only going to happen once, so don't be its fool and try to do something to make it count.