If you are anything like me and like many other people, right before the start of 2026, you probably sat down and pondered what you wanted to improve about your life in the new year. You likely came up with a few resolutions: to eat healthier, to improve the quality of your schoolwork, to stop procrastinating doing homework, to wake up earlier, to exercise more, or to improve in a sport. Like the majority of people making resolutions, you may have felt very motivated at the beginning of the New Year to meet your goals. But, as typically happens with resolutions, you likely ran into roadblocks that derailed your newfound passion. There are two common responses to how people have faced this. Either you pushed through and are still going strong, or you started easing up on your discipline and may have even abandoned your goals completely. I was wondering what path the majority of people typically end up taking, so I interviewed a group of students at Cardinal Newman asking what their resolutions were and if they were still going strong with them. 70% percent of students said they made New Year’s resolutions. The most popular categories were working out (22%), eating healthy (33%), or improving schoolwork (22%). It was most common, across all categories, for participants into the first month of the New Year to still be keeping true to their resolutions. However, they felt less motivated and less disciplined in their efforts. Only half of the participants who committed to a fitness goal kept their goal. One student who had committed to working out everyday explained that she only managed to work out three days of the week because of her schoolwork. Over half of those who committed to eating healthy admitted that they had been lax with following through or had not even begun to make changes in their diet. On the contrary, all of the students who wanted to improve the quality of their schoolwork said that they had continued to work hard and had seen improvement. In conclusion, though working out was the most popular category for New Year’s resolutions, students who made goals focusing on improving their academics were the most motivated and had the best results.