I’m trying to keep up with my New Year’s resolution, but as easy as it is to say “New Year, New Me,” it’s not that easy to stick to my word. What could I do to stay motivated?

Generally speaking, New Year’s resolutions are created because it’s something you need to do but don’t exactly want to be doing. For example, if someone decides that they want to start working out for the new year, they probably didn’t want to work out last year. I can certainly say this is true for me. The best advice that I can give you is to try to make it as fun as possible. If you want to be more active, maybe come up with a special playlist of songs that you can only listen to while you’re exercising. If you want to lose weight, team up with other people and turn it into a friendly game, especially if you can add stakes that will keep you interested without ruining your enjoyment. This goes for studying too, where I’ve heard people say that you could leave a gummy bear at the end of each page in your textbook and only eat it once you’ve read that far. I wouldn’t recommend using that particular tactic if you’re trying to go on a diet, but it’s part of my general advice: If you want to keep yourself interested or motivated, make whatever you’re doing fun!

It’s my first year here, and since last semester was pretty wild, I haven’t really faced a normal semester just yet. Is there anything I need to look forward to for this semester that I might have missed in the fall?

This semester should be much smoother than the fall, simply down to the fact that we’re not scheduled to lose four weeks of school this spring. Though I can’t promise that classes will get easier, they should feel a lot more organized this time around. Last semester was hard on everyone from students to teachers to higher-ups, so everyone was a bit frantic toward the end. This time around, expect more events to go as scheduled, like the full-length Hawk-In (as opposed to the Mini Hawk-In that got split up into two days last November due to rescheduling). Towards the end of the semester, you will also be reminded by all of the warm weather that UNC Wilmington is really a beach school, and since a lot of students that I speak to point to the beach as one of the reasons they’re going here in the first place, people generally start to look a bit happier when you see their faces walking down Chancellor’s Walk. If you haven’t found your groove yet, this semester will be a great time to do it!

I couldn’t get a lot of the courses I wanted and had to pick a bunch of random classes in a panic. Now that I look at my schedule, it looks like a lot of my back-to-back classes are pretty far from each other. Do you have any tips for getting to class on time?

I actually had a similar issue at the back in August because I lived on the opposite side of campus from most of my classes. The first thing I did was walk to all of my classrooms before the semester officially began and time myself, searching for a new shortcut during each trip so that I could get to my destination quicker. It’s a bit of a different situation for you since the semester will have already started once this answer is posted, but you also have the advantage of having gone to your first two days of class already. If your professors have been anything like mine, you probably haven’t been staying for the whole 50 or 75 minutes of class just yet, and while that could mean that rushing to other classes hasn’t been a problem so far, it also gives you more time to go to your teachers with problems and questions. Most professors are pretty cool with you showing up a minute or two late since they were college students once as well, so as long as you let them know what the situation is, I’m sure the distance between classes will start to become less of a problem – even if you might be panting at the beginning of each class.