I’m sitting in the Student Media conference room a week before the next wellness day. One of the opinion section editors mentions this and asks if we still want to meet next week. Someone responds, “Sure, that’s really just a homework day for me.” “Same,” someone else says. “Yeah,” another person says, “it’s sad that we spend wellness days just catching up.”

When a day for wellness becomes a day for homework, that shows a detachment between what the University intends to do for students and what students have to do for themselves.

None of this is to say the University puts no planning into wellness days. The various wellness events hosted throughout the semester are helpful to a lot of students, especially those on wellness days themselves.

That being said, many of the University’s wellness events center on wellness outside the academic setting. If you visit the Wolfpack Wellness website, you’ll find many great resources and events like The Nature Experience, tutorials on gym equipment, International Tea Time and more.

However, if students aren’t able to attend these events because they have to catch up on work, that indicates they have another unmet need. Wellness and classwork being treated as separate mental domains is a bit ridiculous, especially when the immediate purpose of college is to get a degree.

About 39% of undergraduates at NC State have taken out federal student loans, which is nearly two in five students. Generally, when someone takes out student loans, they intend to get the degree that will help them pay it back, especially given that defaulted student loans can affect your borrowing ability, credit score and how much the government garnishes, or rather directly takes, from you.

For 39% of our undergraduates, getting a degree is essential. While the Academic Success Center is great for students who are behind, support is also needed for the students who have too much on their plate.

When students are turning a wellness day into a homework day, it’s safe to say they don’t have enough time to balance personal wellness and schoolwork. Stellar time management can only do so much once we throw in honors, clubs, jobs, internships, scholarship requirements and service hours, much less mental, physical, emotional and spiritual health.

So what can the University do? I would propose catch-up/wellness days.

Effectively, this would take the form of Monday and Tuesday classes being optional study halls with the professor. Ideally it would take place after the fourth and/or 12th weeks of each semester to intervene before classwork gets too heavy.

Wellness activities would still take place during the week, and professors would not be allowed to assign work or set due dates during these days, as is the case with current wellness days.

By virtue of making a given wellness day twice as long, that would provide more flexibility in how students use their wellness time.

For many, a wellness day seems like an ideal pocket of time to cram work into. But by extending the time and making its use more general, students can use that time to do work and take care of themselves.

Furthermore, by keeping classes going as usual in the form of study hall, time is made for students to get their work done where they might not have had as much prior to. It also maintains routine, so students can still attend classes as per usual if they choose to.

This may also provide professors with a bit of feedback. If more students show up to a catch-up session to ask questions, professors might notice they’re moving through content too quickly. If a lot of students come with a lot of homework to complete, they may recognize that the course load may be too daunting. If no students show up, it could indicate the course is going very well or very poorly.

While this is not a perfect solution, especially amid a current mental health epidemic, it may be better than what we currently have.

I don’t think any of us want to spend a wellness day doing homework. I don’t think any of us want to turn in assignments late or miss class because we’re overwhelmed. And I don’t think any of us want to have to pick between academic success and taking care of ourselves.

We all want to do well, in our education and our health, but wellness days, as they currently operate, aren’t enough.