Are you staying in Finland for your winter break? It’s a great opportunity to fill your days off with entertaining and productive activities! You finally don’t need to worry about school deadlines and projects. Which makes it easy for you to decide on your priorities and focus on those in your benefit!
Read ahead and find out a few ideas on how to spend your winter break with most value!
Have Some “Lazy” Time
I’m guessing you’ve been working very hard this year. You deserve to take a break. It’s totally okay to spend few days doing nothing important. Moreover, it’s essential to give yourself time for that. Mental and physical well-being is an important part of your overall happiness. Therefore make sure to rest well, better your sleeping schedule and find joy in your everyday tasks.
While you’re on a break you can try something new! One of those things could be learning how to cook Finnish holiday foods. Making gingerbread cookies (piparkakut) or Christmas pastries (joulutorttu) is simple since you can find all the ingredients including frozen dough at a local convenience store. If you want to make it all yourself, you can use detailed recipes that are available online. For example, there is an online Finnish Christmas Cookbook that you can use for your “kitchen experiments”. Invite your friends over and have a cooking contest! 😉
After cooking, choose a favorite movie you like to re-watch during winter and enjoy the evening with your friends and Christmas treats! Some of the ultimate favorites to watch on your winter break:
- Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
- The Grinch
- Elf
- Home Alone
- 101 Dalmatians
Bring Back the Productivity
Winter break is a good time to reflect on your academics as well. Now that the semester at a university has ended, you can see for yourself what courses you succeeded at, what subjects you liked to study and so on. Understanding your aspirations not only helps you with better planning of your future study plan, but also helps you to find extra-curricular activities that will support your focus.
If talking about productivity, it’s worth mentioning things that most of the time get put off when you’re at university: your CV and LinkedIn profile. As it was mentioned in one of the previous blog posts, improving your achievement list is an ongoing process which is better to start once you enter a university if not before that.
Therefore, spend few hours looking over your CV and LinkedIn profile. If you don’t have either of those, it’s the time to finally make them! Add any extra-curricular activities you took part in during the semester, any eye-catching course you took or contests you participated in! Being active counts and it pays off when you searching for opportunities.
After you uplift your CV, you can surf the web for any internship or part-time jobs opportunities. Apply to those and hopefully, Santa Claus will reward you with great prospects very soon!
If you’d like to expand your knowledge finding new things you enjoy, you may search for some online courses. CampusOnline provides many interesting options in English from Finnish universities of applied sciences. If you’re enrolled at a Finnish UAS, those online courses are free of charge for you and you can include those studies in your degree! Another great resource you may use is Coursera – hundreds of paid and free online courses from universities around the globe to never stop learning!
And of course, don’t forget to read! Reading is actually fun, if you find the right book. Leave behind all the course books for a moment and pick something easy and gripping! Spending a day or half-a-day in a library may be something you’d like to try this winter! Take a look at the TED’s winter reading list for your inspiration and find a book for yourself.
Winter Land
Hey, you’re so lucky to be in Finland! Where else you can enjoy winter as much as you can here? 😉
You can choose anything you like out of dozens of winter activities:
- Skiing or Snowboarding
- Snowmobiling
- Snowshoeing
- Dog Sledding
- Finnish Sauna
- Ice Fishing
- Chasing the Northern Lights and many more!
Grab your friends, go outside and enjoy your free time! Don’t be afraid to look odd, in contrast bring back your inner child and have fun: make a snowman and have a snowball fight!
You don’t necessarily need to travel anywhere to do all those fun things. However if you wish, Lapland would be one of the top winter destinations to visit!
As you can see, there are plenty of things you can do this winter! Enjoy and find something that makes you happy! Don’t ever stop exploring and learning, the hard work you put in right now will eventually pay off!
Edunation wishes you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
