A month into your new semester, I hope you all have got used to your timetables and are familiar with the campus. Unless you were one of the few people who were extremely lucky enough to have successfully enrolled into all the courses you chose, for most university students, free periods are inevitable. The majority of students will hang out with their friends or just sit back and relax before their next lecture, or even work on last minute assignments.

However, when free periods extend to more than one time block, students become enervated because then they get to wonder about all the other wonderful things they could be doing elsewhere off campus. This article is dedicated to all students who have long free periods; worse still, if you have to spend it all by yourself. If you can’t escape them, make the most out of them! Here are a few tips for you to survive the rest of your semester.

To begin, I would like to mention a few things Kookmin University is offering to students during free periods. The first option is Sungkok Library. On the first floor there is a Multimedia Information Centre. Here, with nothing but your student ID card, you can watch many things from documentaries to movies and animation; comfortably on a one-person-seat computer. On the fifth floor there is another amazing facility; the museum(under construction). There are many items and programs which display historical information. Similarly, if you are an art enthusiast, you can visit the Kookmin Gallery in the College of Arts to freely view amazing artworks. Not under any pressure of having to critically analyze the pieces, you can just simply appreciate them and think to yourself about what art means to you.

Next, KMU offers scholarships. There are various scholarship programs for different year students to study English during their free periods. After paying their tuition, students get 50% of their money back as scholarships after they have completed their courses. Another key scholarship is the ‘Labor Scholarship’. Students work in the administration departments or the libraries during their free periods, and it is popular among students because the pay per hour is high.

Another great suggestion for managing free-period time is generated from the concept of ‘healthy body, healthy mind’. KMU also has a ‘Wellness Centre’ for students to use. The facility provides various types of sporting equipment to assist you to keep fit. The trainers at the Wellness Centre are qualified to provide proper work-out information. If intense physical activities are not your thing, just wear comfortable shoes at school and take a slow walk around our campus. What a nice thing to have a Green Campus!

Nevertheless, especially if you’ve just had lunch, you will most likely feel sleepy and couldn’t even be bothered to concentrate. Then I would suggest that you go to the common room of your department for a quick nap. In fact, it has been scientifically proven that a short afternoon nap will not only help your brain circulate better, but also relieve your fatigue.
In this way, although free periods may sometimes feel like a waste of time, there are some worthy activities for you to try out and ease your boredom. Besides, right around the corner are your midterm exams and I will bet you that free periods will never have been so appealing.