Going home is always one of the best things a stressed student can do. There is nothing better than a home cooked meal, fresh laundry, and your own bed. But, it is so hard to plan which weekend to go home amongst the many busy fall weekends. Every time I talk to my mom or dad on the phone, they always ask me when I am coming home to visit. I feel guilty telling them that I am too busy either because of a social or a game day, but parents need to realize that fall weekends are always busy ones.              

Fall already has a limited number of weekends because the first four weekends of fall are during dry-rush. While these are opportune weekends to go home for many girls who have recently finished the longest two weeks of their lives, these weekends are tough for us guys to go home, because we are still swamped with recruitment. As soon as rush is over, social season begins, and there are really no free weekends. 

Even when we don’t have a football game, there are still lines outside all the bars for people partaking in “away game day”. Badgers don’t skip out on the festivities simply because the team is not in town. However, game days are not the only weekend activities that begin to fill up the weekends as the semester goes on.

Around this time of the semester, midterms have finished, or started up, leaving us with academic obligations to stay at school. If your midterms have finished, there is the massive dilemma of whether to relax and take the weekend off at home, or celebrate being done with midterms.

If academics are not tying you down towards the end of the semester, maybe formal season is. The last five weeks of the semester begin formal season. There are the lucky few who lose an entire weekend to formal because their chapter has an away formal, or they are the lucky dates of those who do. Away formals are a blast, but they tend to take the only free weekends we have when there is no football game. Even if you do not have an away formal, formal season can be consuming. Many people attend multiple formals and use their downtime on those weekends to catch up on things like homework, or studying for midterms.

Fall is a busy season. There are game days, midterms, and formals. Mom and Dad sometimes just have to wait until breaks to see you, or just ask your parents to come visit you and let them have the weekend of a lifetime in Madtown.