We are at the halfway point in the semester. Halloween is right around the corner and so are midterm assignments. Suddenly it’s dark by six, it’s cold, wet, windy. Your immune system can’t seem to fight off the common cold anymore, and you find yourself (like many) sniffling in lectures and coughing constantly.
The real horror isn’t a bunch of maniacs in masks, it is student life. By this stage in the semester you might find yourself eating pasta four times a week, turning to staples like beans on toast or one of my favorites, cheese toasties.
Suddenly the bougie lifestyle you had during fresher’s feels like a lifetime ago. Take – aways are now non – essential items, your social life must be planned now in accordance with which assignment is due first and you find yourself in a constant state of tiredness.
It’s not all doom and gloom though. Halloween means bank holiday weekend, and for NUI Galway students that means having a Monday off for once. It means having a break for one weekend from the commuting, rushing, packing, trying to get to Aldi before it closes, and most importantly it gives us a chance to breathe.
Halloween as a fresher and Halloween as a final year are two very different stages in your college life. As a fresher you end up going out in the week leading up to and the weekend of Halloween. You spend hours getting your costume ready, fixing your special fx makeup and coming up with a spooktacular caption for the Instagram you’ll be posting the next day.
In final year, by the time you make it home for Halloween you’re lucky if you get the chance to sit down. You end up watching classics like Halloweentown, Hocus Pocus, The Addams Family and eating all of the ‘halloween candy’ as you flick through stories on Instagram of someone dressed up as a celeb, a bad pun, something straight out of a nightmare.
What’s not to love about Halloween though? Great films, great food, its one night in the year where people can dress up and pretend to be someone else, there is pumpkin in pretty much anything you can think of, also it’s a bank holiday weekend and I don’t know any student out there who doesn’t love a break.
Happy Halloween to all our readers.
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