Hi there, readers! It’s great to be back! Spring break is over, and I can’t wait to put my nose to the grindstone again! I feel adequately rested and prepared for the coming 10 weeks of school!
April Fools.
Why is it that we college students love spring break so much? In the family of school holidays, it is by far the shortest, at only one week long – winter vacation is three weeks long, whereas our summer vacation comes close to 3 1/2 months. However, MTV does not devote as many hours of programming to drunken summer revelry or crazy Chanukah parties. No, spring break seems to make up for its short length with an abundance of craziness, like the little brother who tries to prove his worth with beachside keg stands and Girls Gone Wild videos. However, now that my break is over I can’t help but feel unfulfilled, and not just because I did not personally witness any girls going wild.
I am not the sort of person who bitches and moans at the end of every break from school. After three weeks of winter vacation this year I was dying to get back to the college life in Eugene, and after a summer spent working two jobs in the food service industry, I had gained a whole new appreciation for my college education. Spring break, on the other hand, has always been to me like a cup of Key Lime Pie-flavored Yoplait – delicious and refreshing, but over much too soon. For a lot of students, winter term is often the roughest term, when they stack up the most demanding course load to coincide with nasty weather, which leaves few options but to stay in the library.
It’s so unfortunate, then, that our shortest break comes after the term when a lot of us exert ourselves the most. God knows I maintained an unwavering devotion to my studies throughout winter term, which was reflected in the truly excellent grades I received over the break.
April Fools.
This year, the Oregon University System shortened winter break by a week and added the extra time onto summer break. The reason for the shortened winter break, according to the OUS, was to keep with its policy of beginning each new term on a Monday – working around holidays like Labor Day and Christmas makes it tough to start the term exactly on a Monday, so a week had to be shifted around.
I don’t object to winter break being shortened from a month to three weeks – Christmas dinner with my extended family is just what it takes to make me want to come back to school again – but I have to say, tagging the extra week onto summer vacation, which is already some 13 weeks long, feels like too much of a good thing, and a bit misguided. It doesn’t matter to me which day of the week the term begins on, and I’d much rather cut my summer vacation and go to school for one more week in June if it meant I got one more week of break in late March.
My advocacy for a lengthened spring break isn’t just based in my perceived difficulty of winter term, either; wouldn’t it make a little more sense if winter and spring breaks were closer to the same length, just for consistency’s sake? If spring break were longer, it would be easier for those who wanted to work to earn money for the coming term. A two-week position is somewhat easier for an employer to negotiate than one that only lasts seven days, and it also affords more time to actually make money. Also, a second week of break would allow enough time for people who had spent a week in Cancun to get home, acclimate to our climate and buy enough emergency contraception to compensate for their week of hedonism.
As the Oregon University System determines the break schedules for all state schools, a change like this would have to be unilateral, and thus would affect tens of thousands of students and also incur significant logistical costs in terms of rescheduling events displaced by the lengthened spring break. While it may seem like a pointless expenditure to put all this effort into a change that relates mostly to students’ desire for more time off of school, we must remember that OUS already went through this process when it delayed the beginning of the school year by an additional week for scheduling purposes. How many of you would gladly start school on a Thursday if it meant having two weeks of spring break?
I suppose if there’s any benefit to our current, week-long spring break, it’s that it allows us to continue into spring term with whatever momentum we have left from the winter. I, for one, will not take this for granted. This term, knowing 14 weeks of summer are ahead of me, I’m going to throw myself into my studies headfirst. I’ll start doing research, beating my deadlines and striving to become the best student I can be. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to start taking my education seriously.
April Fools.
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