As soon as December hits the first thing on student’s mind is when are we getting out for winter break. We know that finals week is coming up, and the semester is coming to an end. The only problem is we have to wait until three days before Christmas day until we can officially say we’re on winter break. That is just too deep into December to fully enjoy the Christmas spirit in our hometowns. Other colleges get out at the beginning of December, like either the first or second week, but these same colleges start classes much earlier than we do.

We don’t start classes until after Labor Day, which is a week into September. A lot of colleges are already in their third week of classes by then and that’s because they start the fall semester around the third or fourth week in August. Being that they start earlier, they get to finish earlier.

There is no reason why we can’t start the same time the other colleges do. I’m sure students wouldn’t mind starting classes in August if that means having an earlier winter break. After talking to a sophomore, Marc Arboleda, he stated, “It makes no sense for us to start so late, the quicker I can get through the semester the quicker I can get home for Christmas.” Marc also happens to be on the football team and he expressed his views about that as well.

The football starts training camp on August 6^th. That means they are here, on campus, for an entire month before school starts. That’s a huge gap between football and classes and that makes their semester even longer. Instead of the normal four months that usually make up the fall semester, they have five.

Then there are the students that come from a far distance. We have students from Hawaii, California, Florida, etc. Plane tickets are expensive especially around holiday time. With the semester ending so close to Christmas that affects travel time and cuts down the amount of family time these students have. A lot of these students don’t get the chance to see their families at all during the course of the fall and at some point they just need to feel the comforts of home again without worrying about the price of tickets and losing precious family time.