Unless you’ve been living under a sun-warmed tropical rock, you’re well aware that “gloomy… Unless you’ve been living under a sun-warmed tropical rock, you’re well aware that “gloomy winter’s come again” — to quote an extremely not-famous Scottish song. As I was lying on my memory-foam mattress all weekend, surrounded by my corn flakes, instant Netflix and other reasons not to go out, I thought back to last winter and what I was doing exactly one year ago. Then I switched off the screen displaying the girl inhaling computer dust remover on “Intervention” and started looking up internships.

You see, I am a person prone to easy panic, but last winter I don’t think I panicked enough about my future. I was blissfully unconcerned as I skipped along the frosty streets of South Oakland, thinking about boys and butterflies and getting a BlueMax HD light for my seasonal affective disorder. I was the polar bear that grumbled all winter, convinced that summer was never going to come again. Accordingly, I didn’t have to worry about what I was going to do when classes let out, my friends moved away and my dad came to fetch me home in April.

What I ended up doing, of course, was nothing  — for about the first three days. It was nice until I turned into an apathetic bored-a-holic, schlepping from room to room and complaining about the air conditioning. Sure, in the middle of final-exam week I had looked forward to “reading” and “watching movies,” but you can only read for so long before you realize that it’s been a week since you’ve gone to a party, much less done a solid day’s work. To keep from being a complete waste of space, I went back to my old job, substitute teaching.

Teaching involves a lot of things I don’t like. First of all, it means I have to go back to middle school, a place where I spent my darkest adolescent days. It also means I have to talk to the same kind of characters who I didn’t much like at 13 and still don’t really care for — other teachers. In desperation, I applied to a last-minute internship in Washington, D.C. I won’t name the organization, but the position was just a little better than awful. I quit and came back to Pittsburgh and spent the summer hanging out with my friends. It was great fun, but nothing to put on a resumé.

The point of that lengthy personal anecdote was to say: Don’t be like me. Just because April seems far off doesn’t mean that it’s not going to come. In fact, it comes much more rapidly than seems possible. In practically no time at all, we’ll be harrumphing over our new sunburns and how our shorts show off our cellulite. As a side note, maybe winter isn’t so bad after all.

Maybe I’m the only jackalope out there who needed this advice, but here it goes anyway: It’s never too early to start thinking about how you want to spend your summer. These are the last few years we will be able to get away from our full-time jobs and school and run off and do whatever we want. And take it from me, the good internships have early deadlines. The ones that are still looking for interns in April and May probably couldn’t find any suckers to come in earlier.

And why not check out a new city? I feel old now, and I think it’s safe for me to give some “father knows best”-type guidance. Pittsburgh grows old after a while. That being said, I’m not looking for a bunch of Steelers fans to jump down my throat. It’s a great city, and I don’t think I could have been happier going anywhere else for college. But as I’ve moved up, I’ve realized how much I sometimes want to get away and get a new perspective. After a while you realize you and your friends — God bless them — have been holding practically the same conversations for the past two months. You keep running into that one person you made that mistake with freshman year, and it’s still awkward. The walk from campus to your apartment has become so familiar that you forget how you got from the Cathedral to your living room. Summer in Oakland is a sweet time, but it makes the school year seem longer when you haven’t had time to miss your city. If you’re anything like me, you’ll start craving a new place, new faces and a new routine.

To summarize: Figure it out early, before getting bogged down or — worse — forgetting that it’s coming. Even if places you’d like to work don’t have anything posted for the summer, e-mail them. It never hurts to ask. And best of all, figure out where you want to go and aim for that. We all need something to keep us moving through February.

E-mail Caitlyn at [email protected].