Due to COVID-19, NC State was forced to adopt a school schedule last semester that did away with fall break and cut down on the number of school days so that the term ended just before Thanksgiving break. This was not a rash decision. The university board carefully listened to a number of professionals. Most of them expressed that if the University were to be opened during the month of December, there would certainly be a spike in the number of COVID-19 cases, making it nearly impossible to adequately control the infection rates. After this thorough decision-making process, the University decided to transition to the accelerated schedule.

Now that the semester is over, several students have professed their support for the 2020 fall schedule, and many have even suggested that the University adopts this schedule for future semesters. Unless the University is facing another dire health crisis, NC State should not adopt the fall 2020 schedule for several reasons. 

First and foremost, the schedule was far too compressed, and it severely compromised the quality of our education. Several professors, including some of my economics and political science professors, had to actually drop material from the curriculum just so that they could finish the term on time. To recap some of last semester’s curriculum disasters:

• If you were in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, books that would typically take at least two weeks to read were suddenly expected to be finished in less than a week. Thought-provoking discussions that would usually last for more than three days were condensed so that they would finish within an hour. 

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• If you were in the College of Sciences, labs were required to be conducted online or, in other cases, were eliminated altogether. These were labs that truly cemented students’ understanding of chemistry and biology. 

• In the College of Engineering, professors of notoriously complex courses, such as physics, obligated students to learn the same amount of material as they normally would learn, despite the reductions of school days. Many of the professors were not able to go into as much detail for each concept as they would have hoped. 

Another reason that made the fall 2020 semester inferior was how it cut down on time students typically would have utilized for having fun with their friends. The fall 2020 schedule officially ended on Nov. 17. Were this to be the new norm, it would be relatively difficult for the student body to take part in common traditions such as Friendsgiving or enjoying snow days with friends. I have fond memories of organizing a Friendsgiving with some of my buddies, or watching holiday movies with mugs of hot chocolate in our hands. These are all activities that are likely to be rendered obsolete if the fall 2020 schedule were to become the new norm. 

Furthermore, the student body went from working nonstop from August until November to not working (academically speaking) for nearly two months. As we are settling back into the spring semester, many of us are finding it tremendously uncomfortable to transition to the new work schedule. The spring semester, which is very much like the fall 2020 calendar aside from the fact that it has four wellness days, will likely be another grueling stretch of nonstop academic grinding. 

Finally, the schedule removed the fall break. It was only after experiencing a semester without it that I realized how valuable of a break it was. Fall break gave students some breathing room, a chance for them to mentally recharge so that they could push through the rest of the semester. Without fall break, I, and many of my peers, were essentially running on fumes. I believed that the overall quality of my work and my regimen waned, since I was not given the crucial time to rest my mind. 

Overall, the schedule, if set in stone for the years to come, would set a horrible precedent for students. Having us work constantly for an exceptionally extensive period of time and then resting for an equally long interval of time is absurd. It’s already hard to transition back to school after a three-week break, much less a two-month break.