Along time ago, in a mindset since forgotten, all of us at N.C . State were sitting easy on the beach downing beers with friends, in the mountains hiking to find that perfect view. Maybe you were in a different country experiencing a new culture or perhaps you were just sitting at home relaxing with your family. 

These glorious days of yonder have been dubbed spring break. A carefree place where pending class assignments, early morning lectures and the stresses of being a college student could be ignored, at least for a while. Even more distressing, the respite that seems so fleeting in my memory was little more than two weeks ago.

When I looked back at the calendar to figure out how long it’s been, I found myself falling into a bleak crevasse of despair. Only two weeks have passed since our mid-semester break and yet in these two weeks I have had more assignments, tests, papers and work to do than the entire semester pre spring break rolled into one.

The wear this deluge of work has put on my brain makes me wonder how it is that all of my axons and synapses haven’t gone and blown a fuse, switching off the circuit breaker and leaving me a drooling pile of what was once a student. If this is the pace I’m expected to keep up until May, I don’t know if I’m going to get there with only one mind.

Why has school all of a sudden become so overwhelming? How come every semester after spring break, professors seem to ramp up the work load in an attempt to drive their students to the brink of chaos and push them off the edge? 

In my first two years the jump to insanity was always chalked up to the course being a way to weed out the weak and make sure only the elite were able to advance to the next level. I never liked this excuse since I don’t believe the obnoxiously difficult assignments are a true test of knowledge, but at least it was an excuse.

Now, as a junior, the only answer I seem to get is that the class is hard and that’s all there is to it. Of course I know the course is hard. One of the reasons I came to N.C. State is because I knew about how rigorous the courses are. However, difficulty of a course should not mean that all of a sudden classes get difficult at a certain point.

The problem seems to be a lack of proper prior planning of how much material to cover before spring as opposed to afterward. Never has a class seemed too daunting in the first half of the semester. You always get a reasonable, sometimes even spacious, separation of assignments and tests. It always seems as soon as the second half of the semester is underway, the pace is turned up to 11.

Instead of having an easy half and a freakish half, why don’t professors do the reasonable thing and give a moderate spread of material throughout? It is pointless to ease us into the semester after a summer or winter break if the plan is to skip the weaning phase and go right into hardcore mode after a shorter spring break. That way we could get an accurate idea of whether we should drop a class before the drop date passes instead of finding out we can’t handle it when it’s too late.

Here I am two days into actual spring, the rains are resurrecting the barren trees, the birds are singing in the morning again, life is flourishing everywhere around me and yet I am stuck in EB I working all day long and experiencing what I call spring death.