How to Spend a Meaningful Break

“What are your plans for the break?” This question is no longer an easy one to answer. After graduating high school, vacations transformed into something that had to be spent in a meaningful way. Starting from the very first vacation of my college life, almost more than half of my friends went on a trip. The others signed up for Summer school or activities that could add a line on their resume. Meanwhile, I was either drinking or clubbing with my friends. My kind of break was surely fun. It’s just that it made me get concerned about my future, since it neither created new meaningful memories nor seemed helpful for my future career. However, I still didn’t feel like using up my entire vacation for doing meaningful-maybe closer to “helpful.” With my endless fight between the agonies, I started asking for advices. Most of the answers I have gotten were to “keep calm and grab your chance.” Everyone said that there is no need to feel stressed in advance, because if I wait calmly, something that grabs my attention will show up, and I just got to grasp that. But what if I keep myself too calm and miss all my opportunities?
But there were two important points that I had missed back then. The first point is that there is always a type of work that one can enjoy. The second is that there is always a reason when more than two people talk about same things. This winter, my dad asked if I was interested in having an internship at a sports marketing company and I somehow answered yes. To be honest, the reason for such response was to avoid the worried looks by my family. In other words, though I decided to give a shot for a new type of experience, I wasn’t really ready for stepping into the real society yet.
Nevertheless, the surprising part was that I actually found some fun parts and necessary life skills throughout the internship. Translating documents, attending a meeting, writing official emails and squeezing ideas out of my brain were tough, but they were not “boring works” as I had imagined them to be. Then, my stereotypes about “work” has diminished completely as I was involved in the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Live Site. Although I always believed that there must be much more works than I expect, I thought working in an office would never give me a chance to get out of the place and meet new people. However, though my internship had begun in an office, the rest of it was spent outside, with new people from other companies and countless customers visiting the Live Site. Adding onto that, the range of my work has also expanded dramatically, since so many unexpected situations happened during the event.
By spending two very different kinds of vacations recently, I had a chance to look back at both of them and come up with my own definition of a “meaningful break.” As long as there is no regret, it is enough to be labeled meaningful. Although clubbing every week didn’t provide any new life lessons, I still had fun and could spend time with my friends as much as I wanted to. Participating in a large event as an intern didn’t allow me any time to meet up my friends or relax at home, but I could experience a whole new world. To wrap up this long story about my vacations, I would like to emphasize once again, that spending a meaningful break is NOT HARD AT ALL. The only thing we should keep in mind is to do whatever that would not leave any regret.