GIVE US A BREAK

Though GVSU will have to tough out this semester without a formal fall break, Student Senate is in the process of passing a resolution that might change things next fall

Updated: October 28, 2012, 6:41 PM

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We don’t know about you, Grand Valley State University, but here at the Lanthorn, we’re getting tired. Midterms are over, election season is in it’s prime, and with stacks of papers, exams and assignments still piled in hurdles we’ve yet to clear, we think we might be developing a chronic twitch in our left eye.

That’s why we’re going to go ahead and give a big thumbs up to the GVSU Student Senate’s in-the-works resolution that promotes the creation of a fall break for students with plans of implementation next fall.

The new fall break would give students the Monday and Tuesday following midterms off, a much-needed breath of air for many, and one that is granted to most other public institutions in the state of Michigan.

The break would not give students more days off than we currently have, it would just call for a redistribution of the of existing off-days; final exams would start on Tuesday instead of the Monday of GVSU’s current winter break, and students would no longer have the Tuesday after Labor Day off in order to facilitate the switch.

Senate is working with Fred Antczak, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences to make the fever-dream of fall break a reality, and have talked about working with the Counseling Center on campus to see what times the student need for counseling peaks during the school year.

The American College Health Association surveyed 99,066 students across 141 institutions for their spring 2012 National College Health Assessment, where 86.1 percent of students surveyed reported feeling overwhelmed by their workload over the past 12 months, while 81.6 percent said they felt exhausted in within the same time span, but not from physical activity. A total of 50.7 percent of students surveyed said they had experienced overwhelming anxiety in the past year, and nearly half – 45.6 percent said in the past year, academics had been “traumatic or very difficult to handle.”

Now, we’ll concede that you might just be able to chalk up that last one to episodic melodrama, but there are some valid statistics in there. College is supposed to be hard, college is supposed to challenge our work ethic, college is supposed to test our boundaries; but, not so far that we self-combust.

Just because we can take the stress doesn’t always mean we should – and even if not having a fall break is not as big of a deal as it can sometimes feel, it’s a nice (and welcome) gesture on the part of the senate and university to be working toward the implementation of one.

The Student Senate said they’re still looking for input and opinion on the resolution from students and faculty through a survey, but if the student body is anything like a student-run newspaper, then we can’t imagine there will be too many people shaking their fists at the sky over this one.

Published October 28, 2012 Editorial