Reconsider the calendar

Let’s get real. As college students, we’re usually dissatisfied with something about our college experience. We’ll tirelessly rant that food in college is terrible, the weather is too cold and depressing, and our classes are too challenging. Now, after both winter and spring breaks have passed and the weather grows warmer, I keep thinking about how our academic calendar should be restructured.

The setup we have now isn’t exactly horrible. But as college students, it’s hard not to evaluate what is and what should be. Are our semesters asphyxiating because there aren’t enough holidays to allow for fresh air? Is there a better way to distribute our days off?

The single week of spring break, for example, doesn’t seem to offer enough of a palate cleanser between exams and papers. Adding an extra week might allow our vacation to overlap with our friends’ at other colleges, without letting us sink into the summer mindset just yet. Or maybe just having a couple of four-day weekends during the spring semester would be a better use of our free time.

Though winter break is the longest and most longed-for college break, a huge stretch of open time doesn’t exactly help make a better academic calendar. While it’s true that most college students eagerly look forward to winter break as a welcome respite from their college lives, once students have been able to recover from final exams and holiday activities are over, breaks seems to be filled with days of idleness. This begs the question: is winter break too long?

I would venture to say yes. Cutting a week out of winter break and redistributing the days more usefully throughout the semester—when we’re all exhausted and really need them—would be a more effective use of our time.

As my French Professor, Vincent Aurora, put it, “It’s four weeks of forced inactivity where there is nothing to do. It’s so much more useful to get back to work earlier and take some days off when work is piling up, like during late February or early March, when midterms are piling up.”

There are various possibilities, but the point is that four weeks is a long time, and after the initial holiday cheer, the days drag on while we wait for the spring semester to get rolling. Furthermore, the reason behind the month-long winter break seems to have been an economical one. Back in the 1970s, painfully high oil prices spiked heating costs. Private institutions realized they could reduce spending if they kept their doors closed for a full month during the winter holidays.

So here we are, continuing a trend of the past. While heating costs won’t be any more reduced over time, four weeks gives us too much time to recharge between semesters­—time off that might be more usefully distributed and ultimately productive if it were taken elsewhere in the calendar year. Although it seems bizarre that sleep-deprived students would grumble about winter break being a bit excessive, it’s not entirely uncommon, nor is it ungrateful. We’re not saying that we don’t appreciate the buffer days in between semesters, but that we’d rather not have them all at once. Instead, we should disperse the days from reconfiguring winter break more sporadically throughout the year.

The author is a Columbia College sophomore majoring in mathematics.