Ah, the joys of summer. Cross-country road trips … Weeks spent wasting away on a houseboat … Partying every night of the week … Backpacking across Europe.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? I hope all of you out there had fun, because I, along with approximately 8,000 other University students, spent my summer just like I spend every season: studying.
Yes, that’s right, ladies and gentlemen. I was a slave to school during that holy three-month student sabbath: summer vacation.
What was I doing there? Well, changing my major from music to computer science two years into my college career seemed like a good idea at the time. But little did I know that the consequences would mean taking three extra terms of school. Since I didn’t want to take an entire fifth year of classes, I opted to play catch-up during the summer months.
Many University students have no idea what it is like to take summer school classes. It’s quite different from the normal 10-week term to which most students are accustomed. In fact, there are three different summer terms that run simultaneously. One term is four weeks long, one is eight weeks long and for the truly masochistic, there’s an 11-week academic meltdown.
This summer, I went for the last option, dooming myself to take the entire year-long general chemistry sequence in a compressed 11-week format.
You might be asking yourself, “How on earth can they fit a whole year of chemistry into one summer?”
Well, here’s how: Instead of one-hour classes on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, summer chemistry meets for two and a half hours, four days a week (and for three of the weeks, it meets all five days of the week).
That’s right, my fellow Americans — 10 hours of class per week — the equivalent of more than three weeks of normal classes.
So, where do midterms and finals fit in? Well, since the 11-week summer term moves at such a rapid pace, it’s not uncommon for a midterm or final to occur about once every week or two. In fact, during the 11 weeks of my chemistry class this summer, only two of those weeks did not feature a midterm or a final.
Hardcore.
“I believe that summer school provides an excellent opportunity for learning and growth,” said Mike Savage, a senior majoring in psychology. “Eugene is beautiful in the summertime.”

Savage said he had to attend summer school two years ago in order to stay on top of the music theory sequence in which he was enrolled.
Susie Waterman is a junior pharmacy major at Oregon State University. She also happened to be in my chemistry class this summer. What was she doing there?
It turns out that the University was one of only two Oregon colleges that offered general chemistry during the summer. OSU was not one of them.
“If I didn’t take the class, I would have been a whole year behind in getting into the pharmacy program,” Waterman said.
I asked her what the biggest differences were between summer term and normal terms.
“The pace was a lot faster than normal. We covered a chapter per day as opposed to a chapter per week,” she said. “It was fast, but I still felt like I got a lot out of it, even though we didn’t go into as much detail as we would have otherwise.”
Not all summer school classes are as academically stressful, however. I also took an eight-week math class which didn’t seem very different from the norm, apart from the fact that it met five days each week instead of four.
All in all, I’m glad that I took summer school this year. Yeah, going to school for three and a half hours per day, four or five days per week, was kind of a drag. I had to deal with the sun shining brightly outside the window, receiving postcards every week from lucky friends who went to exotic places, and being stuck in Eugene most of the time. But it sure beat taking an entire three terms of general chemistry. In the long run, it’s going to save me a lot of hassle down the line.
Plus, I’m really starting to enjoy the sympathetic looks that I’ve been getting from people after I answer their question, “So, Dave, what did you do on your summer vacation?”