And you can watch the whole Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Photo by Robert Deutsch, USA TODAY. It’s bound to happen at some point – that day when you don’t make it home for a major holiday. For me and other students like me, this Thanksgiving marked that milestone.
Ours is not a position to pity. We didn’t have to pack, fight traffic or long airport lines. We didn’t adjust to new time zones or have to reintegrate into household dynamics.
Actually, we probably ate more turkey than you did, accumulated more hours of sleep, banked some holiday pay and edged out our fellow interns.
Now as the rest of you make the great migration back to campus after filling your stomachs with home-roasted turkey and Grandma’s green bean surprise, we’ve been here all along.
Here are five highlights of the true college student Thanksgiving that you missed:
1. At home you most likely have a single Thanksgiving dinner, or maybe two if you’re really lucky. By staying on campus I had no less than three dinners: between a campus meal, a holiday lunch at work and a complete dinner my parents ordered for me from the grocery store that was just as tasty as what’s served at home.
A word of caution though: be careful about adding macaroni and cheese to your menu from the deli counter. They sell that stuff by the pound and $23 dollars later; I’ve been eating mac and cheese for days.
2. When campus is deserted it’s easy to sleep-in. There were no delivery trucks at the coffee shop below my window and no roommates getting up early to take a shower. Just pure silence and me finally waking up to ask myself, wait, is it really 1:00 already?
3. Thanks to the wonders of Facebook and social media, I didn’t miss hearing what all of my friends and family are thankful for this holiday – there were even some nice notes saying my presence around the Thanksgiving table would be missed. And then just like what would have happened at home in person, the conversations quickly turned to tackling Black Friday.
4. The next highlight comes from George Mason junior Alexa Roth who actually put her dorm kitchen to use to whip-up some baked macaroni and cheese, corn pudding, mashed potatoes and apple pound cake, proving you don’t have to be home to have a home-cooked a holiday feast.
The corn pudding is a must-have holiday classic for Roth, so her mother sent a care package complete with the pudding recipe to insure the tradition wouldn’t be lost on a holiday spent in a dorm room. For a first holiday spent at school, Roth said it was drama free and enjoyment full.
5. If you ever ask advice for interns, it’s often show-up, don’t complain and people will notice your hard work. Such words are never truer than around the holidays when companies are understaffed and the work of an intern is all the more appreciated. As an added bonus, when the real staff if gone, the intern often gets to log some great added experience. So instead of visiting with grandma at home in the dining room, you could be networking in the boardroom like my fellow campus-holiday warriors and me.
Now well rested and well fed without the stress of traveling, we’re ready from the last few weeks of classes and those pesky final exams, and then we will be home for Christmas.
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