The holiday break is great. After a tough fall semester – whether you’re a professor, student or staff – it’s nice to have time to relax, reflect and rejuvenate.

But just as nice as the break is, the fallout of coming back and getting in gear for the spring can be tough.

Here are five mildly interesting tips to getting the brain back into the college swing of things if you’re a student. 

1. Go See A Professor

Professors. They’re always excited about engagement, research, inquiry and the such, right? Go see one. Or three. Visit new professors that are on your schedule this semester. Pick their brains. Ask them about their holiday.

2. Go See An Advisor

OK, hopefully you’ve already done this for the spring semester. And this might be something you hold off on until after registration (if you haven’t seen the lines on the final day to sign up for classes, it might be an interesting field trip … it’s a mix between a Hannah Montana concert and “Night of the Living Dead”). But it might be good to look at your transcript, start planning for the summer and fall and just refamiliarize yourself with yourself.

3. Go See A Campus

You’re mom might tell you to go to your campus and find the classrooms in which you’ll be studying. There are worse ideas. Why wait until the first day of classes to rush around to find I215, which is situated amid the deep recesses of the Spring Creek Campus? Plus, there’s something cathartic about a quiet, relatively empty campus. Well, maybe not cathartic, but it is quiet.

4. Go See “Dead Poet’s Society”

Not a college movie, per se, but if Patch Adams can’t get you excited about learning, no one will. Plus, “Knox Overstreet” was in “Sports Night” which was a wildly underrated TV show.

5. Go See The Quaker Oats Man

First day of class. Get a decent night’s sleep. Eat some oatmeal. Down some pomegranate juice. Step into the spring semester, don’t let it step on you.