I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving.

If you were like me, you slept in, ate the entire day, watched some mediocre football and caught up with family, friends and loved ones.

It was a nice escape while it lasted. Now, welcome back to the reality of college life. With only two weeks of classes left before finals, things are about to get hectic for most of us.

That is why it is important to reflect back on the holiday and hold on to that warm fuzzy feeling you had (the one you got from celebrating with your family, not the one from the turkey and wine).

Thanksgiving is about one thing -- being happy with what you have. It isn't a time for wanting and obsessing; it is a time for contentment and joy.

Sure, you may indulge the glutton in you on Turkey Day, but you only have that opportunity because we have been greatly blessed. Now, we have to try and keep that mentality up. It isn't easy.

Christmas commercialism will be trying to tell us how much we need this or that new fad item, and the end of the semester work is going to start bogging us down.

I am coming to a crossroads. Senior year is fast approaching and it's time for me to start thinking about what I am going to do after Penn State. Where do I want to go to graduate school? What do I want to specialize in? Do I even want to keep going to school at all?

Combine that with up-and-coming papers, last minute homework crunches and a jam-packed exam schedule, and it sort of seems like everything is piling on me at once. So when I went home I was fairly stressed.

I enjoyed the time off but I knew I was going to have to come back to school and the work and decisions that were waiting for me.

Luckily, I had my family there to help me out.

I talked to my parents and they helped me to see things clearly. All the work and decisions are still here, but I know that I can be happy no matter where my life takes me. Good grades and material success aren't everything, and I don't have to have my whole life planned out. I always knew that, but I guess I just forgot.

It is an easy thing to lose sight of because the culture of college life is centered on wanting. We want to get the best grades, to meet the best people and to make these four years the best of our lives. And that is wonderful, because in many ways these are the best four years of our lives.

But if you worry too much about schoolwork, jobs and wild nights, then it is easy to lose track of all the really great things that we already have. A truly happy person doesn't have to work to make college the best time ever. It happens naturally because that person can always appreciate what he or she has.

My mom used to always tell me to be a well-rounded individual. That means not focusing too much on one thing, but rather expanding your horizons and taking in all life has to offer. But college does just the opposite. We earn a degree and become highly specialized in one field. I guess you could say that we are turned into needles, maybe so that we can push through the competition.

Down that road may lie "success," but that doesn't equate to happiness. You can put all the time and hard work that you want into school, and you can go on to make tons of money or gain lots of fame, but we all remember our being told that "money can't buy happiness."

True happiness comes from learning to live with what you have. Yeah, you keep working for bigger and better things, but you don't let the pursuit of those things get in the way of what you already have. You become content with where you are.

Hopefully, over break we all found reasons to be content. So, once again, I ask you to remember those things and keep them close as finals approach.

Remember things like the hugs you got from your parents and grandparents. Remember the nostalgia you got from catching up with those old high school friends. Remember how great it was to do nothing, and just be alone with yourself and your thoughts for a change.

In short, remember that more than anything, life is about interacting with the people who are close to us. They'll support us when we stumble and hold us even higher when we do well.

To the people who care about us it doesn't really matter if we get an A on our exams or if we land that big internship.

They don't judge us based on how drunk we get on the weekends or how good our football team does. They will stick with us whether we make $40,000 a year or $40 million a year. And why? Because these people, our families, friends, boyfriends and girlfriends, love us.

Simply being able to share our lives is enough to make them happy. Hopefully, that is also enough to make us happy, too. That is what I re-learned over Thanksgiving, and I am truly thankful that I did.

These next few weeks aren't going to be easy for anyone, but we all have plenty of people who can help us get through it. Really, that is true for the rest of our lives. And that makes everything in life a whole lot easier.