Aside from the night after you’ve taken your last final, the first week of school is generally the best time of the whole semester. The weather is great, you’re reunited with all of your friends, and the school year has returned just when you were starting to feel like you had too much free time.

The campus is buzzing with returning students, eager to see what the new year has in store. Even if you anticipate your hardest semester to date, there’s still a feeling of excitement in the air during the very first week.

1. You Get to Scope Out Your New Classes

Maybe I’m a dork, but I was always excited to see what my new classes would be like. In certain classes–the must-take courses taught by the professors with the best reputations– it was great to see what all the buzz was about. Other classes might have sounded intriguing in the course catalog; reading through the syllabus on the first day, I’d think the class sounded interesting, and hadn’t been assigned 500 pages of reading to prove me otherwise. I would also look through the syllabus and see what the course requirements looked like, so I could estimate how little effort I could put into the class, and still walk away with an “A.”

Of course, it’s also fun to see who else has signed up for the class. Whether you walk through the door and see five of the girls from your freshman dorm, or right into the eyes of your new insta-crush, it’s fun to find out who you’ll be taking the class with. Read More »

One of my favorite things to do during the weekend at college was stumble down to the dining hall after a night of partying and fill a cereal bowl with about 8 different kinds of cereal.

Through blurry vision and a pounding head, I would reach for one “good-for-you” brand (for the base), and then proceed to find every sweet option available, filling my bowl to the brim with enough chemically altered sugar to keep me hopping for hours.

You see, when I was younger, my mom never let us have sweet cereal. We’d go with her to the grocery store, beg and plead for something with a cartoon character on it, and she’d simply shake her head, reach for the raisin bran, and state, “filling your mouth with sugar first thing in the morning means the dentist is going to have to pull your teeth.”

She could scare us for a little while, but once I grew up and realized eating sugary cereal doesn’t really dictate how many cavities you get drilled (I was the healthiest kid alive and still had about 3 of them), I vowed to find my way back the bobble-headed cartoons of my youth and their bounty of sweet.

So now, for your consideration, I present the Top 5 Sugary Cereals Of All Time (or at least my childhood):

Reeses’s Puffs: Even though it tasted nothing like the candy, this cereal was still the shit. Chocolate and peanut butter? With milk?! ALL IN ONE BOWL??! Who cared that the balls were hard and scratched up the top part of your mouth? Who cared that they got stale in a day? You were basically eating candy!!! For breakfast!!! Read More »