The Winter Break Reset

Source: https://admission.princeton.edu/blogs/winter-break-reset Parent: https://admission.princeton.edu/undergraduate-student-blog

January 29, 2026

Sebastian Martinez Hall '27

Hey everyone! I’m Sebastian, a junior in the Sociology department from Ellicott City, Maryland. I’m a distance runner for the Princeton Cross Country and Track and Field program. Some of my favorite classes I’ve taken at Princeton include Portuguese for Spanish speakers; The Conservative Tradition of Sociological Thought; American Foreign Policy; Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoyevsky; and Sociology from Bruce Springsteen’s America. When I’m not running ...

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I walked out of my last final of the fall semester on December 16th. That night, my friends and I had a round of celebratory beers at a Witherspoon Street bar. (I turned 21 a few months ago, and sitting around a table at a bar still feels like I’m breaking the law.) The next morning, I woke up and spent a couple of hours working on my final Junior Paper proposal. I submitted it, went for a run, and then got on the Amtrak back home to Maryland. I got home, the night of the 17th, without any work until the spring semester’s start on January 26th—39 days away.

Winter break is the only time of the year that I, and most Princeton students, have the luxury of being so carefree. The summer is a longer break, but most of us do something demanding with our summers—working, researching, taking classes, etc. So, we are left with the winter as the longest moment to catch our breaths.

Winter break for Princeton students didn’t used to be so restful. Until the 2020 academic year, fall semester finals took place in the new year, which gave everyone enough time to forget the material upon which they were going to be examined. Alumni who I meet are quick to bring this up. They tell us how easy we have it now. An alumnus I met described how he dreaded having to study in his childhood bedroom while all his high school friends, already done with their finals, spent the break hanging out like they were back in high school.

When I first got home this break, I was not used to having so much time which I could decide how to spend. I struggled with so much choice. I would wake up and ask myself what I wanted to do. But it felt, rather conversely, like it was hard to commit to choosing something amid so much possibility. So instead of committing to something substantive, I would stay in a state of choice paralysis, switching from thing to thing without actually choosing to do anything. I would cyclically alternate, every few minutes, between scrolling Instagram, playing the same jingle on my guitar, and reading a short snippet of a book before picking my phone back up.

Eventually, I got my act together, even if this was a time of year in which it was okay to not have it together. In retrospect, all the time doing “useless” things was probably even a needed reset. Over the course of the reset and getting my act back together, here are some of the things I did: I spent time with a lot of loved ones. My mom and I visited my grandparents and my godparents, and then we hosted family for Christmas. I spent New Year’s with friends at a cabin in the West Virginia mountains. Then, I spent the first couple of weeks 2026 visiting my dad, who lives in Arizona. A couple of my teammates came to visit, and we prepared for the track season in the desert. Over break I also finalized my summer plans; I read a couple of longer books which looked too intimidating to open during the school year; I practiced the guitar; and I ran 475 miles.

When I got back to Princeton, I felt a freshness about the place. The time I spent in December writing final papers at my desk while chugging coffee feels like an eternity ago. I’m aware that the start of a new semester means that soon enough, it will come to a close, and I will find myself at my desk once more, writing final papers while chugging coffee. But when I’m not in the thick of working so frantically, I find the concept of working frantically appealing. So, for now, with the frantic work far away, I am excited to be back on campus, starting anew after the full reset that winter break provides.