On October 15, here at EMU, we received a fall pause instead of a fall break. Instead of getting a five day break, student’s received one day to relax between session one and session two classes.
The major concern sophomore Hannah Giagnocavo sees is the mental health of her fellow students. She sees the usual fall break as a time to reset and get caught up on homework and sleep. These were two things she didn’t feel this fall pause EMU has implemented as a solution to avoid students to go home accomplished this. Instead of finding fall pause relaxing, she mentioned having a meeting for a class that day. She said that “[fall pause] almost caused me more stress.”
Junior Avery Trinh also wishes things were different. “In an ideal world I think I would’ve definitely loved to have a longer break for sure,” he said. “My understanding was that it was to prevent people from going home and coming back.” Trinh also spoke for several students who had evening classes on the day of fall pause and he said, for them, it didn’t even feel like a break. During his fall pause, he intentionally didn’t do homework.
Sophomore Conrad Nyce described himself like a mechanical spring, he felt stretched for too much for too long. Normally for Nyce “fall break is very useful for stress relieving and getting to wind down a little bit. Last year I went home, saw my family, hung out, [and] got to forget about classwork for a few days before going back to school. But now, I’m tired.” Despite his feelings, he sees the benefits of having a shorter fall pause as it contributes to a safer environment to limit student exposure to COVID.
The general consensus among Trinh, Nyce, and Giagnocavo was that professors have been very understanding in this time. Giagnocavo said, “Two professors, because we don’t have this social connection, have deemed that we have more time and added more work.” This died down in the middle of the semester but now it has ramped up again. She talked about how we have more time to dedicate to assignments and studying since we can’t connect with our friends in the same capacity if they aren’t in our dorm or housing arrangement.
One thing Trinh, Nyce, and Giagnocavo had in common was they felt the fall pause wasn’t enough. Trinh and Giagnocavo shared ideas on how the spring schedule could look different or better. Trinh doesn’t think a full week would be smart since people would be more inclined to go home. He mentioned that we could have interspersed days off instead of one long break. One day here, one day there to try and keep student energy up. In the end he thought this would be good to give himself and other students something to look forward to.
Giagnocavo suggested a two or three day break instead of a full week as spring break usually is. If it was two or three days she said “we could just hang out with our friends in our [living space] because we’re all together anyway… Not having to worry about school, that would be so relaxing and rejuvenating.”
All three of them understood why EMU chose to organize the fall schedule as they did. If this semester was done over again, all of them would have appreciated a longer or breaks interspersed throughout the semester.
