A Break to Remember

As the January exam period draws to a close, many students are breathing sighs of relief at finishing their last ever post-winter break finals. Next year, Harvard will convert to a bi-semester calendar system, which moves exams to before the break, and therefore allows for a longer January vacation. Rationally, this should make me happy—there are plenty of good reasons to make the shift, and I benefit from these changes as much as anyone else. But as I begin to plan my final intersession, I can’t help but feel a little nostalgic.

Last year’s intersession remains one of my favorite Harvard memories. I went up to a friend’s house in Vermont with six other Harvard students, only one of whom I had previously met. After a week of toboggan races, barefoot ventures through the snow from the sauna to the ice pond, and impromptu guitar compositions by burning embers at twilight, I came out with a new group of friends I might never have met otherwise.

A prolonged winter break discourages these kinds of social activities. Under the current system, one can spend reading period at Harvard and a week-long intersession with friends; faced with a three-week long “J-term” in January, on the other hand, many students will likely pass both the two week winter break and the three week J-term at home.

There’s only so much time one can spend with family, though, and hanging out with friends from high school just makes one realize the toll time takes on old friendships. Realistically, the long break will mean a period of solitary confinement, spent glued to the television. For me, two weeks at home is enough—another minute in rural Concord, Massachusetts would make me implode. If I didn’t ever want to leave home, I would have gone to Williams.

Harvard administrators suggest that the three weeks can be used to “encourage individual interests outside the University or provide enhanced educational opportunities such as study abroad, lab experiences, internships, and mini-courses.” But if one goal of the calendar reform was to decrease student stress levels, this is not the way to go about it.

Under the current calendar, for example, my break essentially begins at the culmination of fall classes and ends the first week of February, with just a few exams to interrupt my leisure. By allotting time for both studying and recreation, I can spend my never-ending reading period playing Halo until 5 a.m. on a weeknight and organizing epic games of snow football under dimly lit street lamps. Then I can look forward to an intersession of sledding down beautiful man-made jumps in Vermont.

In contrast, the new calendar encourages students to compete for flash-in-the-pan job opportunities too short to do any real good. For those who have no desire to spend the break doing something careerist or academic—and I’d venture to guess I’m not the only one—three weeks in January is too long to spend on campus. The result is that people will be stuck spending the vacation’s entirety at home, watching the same episode of SportsCenter four times each morning, instead of reuniting with their Harvard friends for a week. Unforgettable breaks like mine are bound to become rarer.

Certainly, I understand the necessity of the calendar alteration. Logistically, it allows students who don’t live 20 minutes away from campus to go home, and it ends the school year in early May, giving Harvard students a competitive advantage for summer jobs.

But come next year, as I’m shopping that dreaded Lit-C core, my mind will be less on Greek myths than on daydreams of my skis carving through fresh powder, during the intersession that could have been. Everybody should treasure this last intersession—I know I will.


Maxwell E. Storto ‘11, a Crimson editorial writer, is an Environmental Science and Public Policy concentrator in Quincy House.