New Year, new me

By Brandon Costolnick

When the clock strikes midnight on December 31, people all around the country rejoice and embrace as they celebrate the coming of a new year.  For many, there are high hopes that this year will be better than the last and that they will grow and change for the better. New Year’s resolutions are set with this particular goal in mind.  Now that time has passed we thought it would be a good idea to check in with a few students enrolled at The College at Brockport to see if they were able to keep their promises to themselves.

Brockport junior, Catherine Mattis, is no stranger to the “New Year, new me” philosophy. She has been setting New Year’s resolutions for years now. Each year she has looked to improve herself in a different way, and this time it’s through positivity.

“My Resolution was to be more positive,” Mattis said. “I am a big fan of positive psychology. I believe that if you put good into the world then you get good out of it.”

However, this isn’t a traditional resolution. Usually when someone makes a New Year’s resolution it is about measurable things like losing weight or making more money. Mattis explained that her more philosophical approach makes for a more beneficial promise.

“In the past those haven’t worked for me, but this positivity ties into all of that,” Mattis said. “I’m definitely a much happier person now then I was a semester ago.”

Someone who shares Mattis’s ideas is fellow junior, Matthew Fritschi.  His resolution was also to be more positive, but he achieved a very different outcome.

“I was trying to be more positive but honestly I forgot about it until right now,” Fritschi said. “I guess I just didn’t put enough effort into it and have been focusing on other things like school instead.”

Fritschi attributed some of his downfall to the fact that you can’t measure being positive.  Positivity is an emotion and can easily be forgotten.

“If it was something more tangible then I may have gone after it a little bit more because there is a goal for me to follow,” Fritschi said. “ I probably still wouldn’t have succeeded but the effort would have been different.”

Not everyone decides to take part in the yearly ritual. For some the making of New Year’s resolutions seems trivial, for others it’s simply too hard. Junior Sam Welkley weighed in on why he chose not to participate this year.

“You can start doing something new at any point during the year,” Welkley said. “You don’t need a new year to improve yourself. However, if people want to rally around this specific day then I fully support them.”

Whether you are still true to your resolution or have fallen short, every day brings a new chance to not only better yourself, but the world around you.