Summer college courses are not for the faint of heart. You'll be hiking from class to class in the summer heat — sweating as the sun-bathed cement just radiates more heat into your brows. You'll sit down in your class and then freeze from the overdose of air blasting from the air conditioning for a grueling three hours. Then you'll leave to repeat the same process.
Now for those grueling three hours, you're subjected to lectures, projects and the unnecessary group projects that plague the classroom. It has been my experience that summer classes are great for the college student that is thirsty for graduation. Rightly so, you can only go for so long. Unfortunately, the timeline summer classes are shorter than a regular semester. An 18-week course condensed into a nine week, or even a four week time period, does not lend itself to allow the student as many breaks between assignments.
My "junemester" class this year for example, will be from June 1-28, 2016: four weeks. A test every week, a group project with a deliverable due every week and four three-hour classes from Monday to Thursday. You would think the professor would be informative and everyone would be on the same page — but we are not. For our first test, there wasn't even a mention of it until the day of on our fourth class. And then our annotated bibliography was not mentioned by our teacher — pretty important group project where he expected 50 students in nine groups to all have our sources together. Thankfully it was listed in the syllabus and everyone in the class continue to talk to each other.
This professor even had a question on our first test with a flaw — the answer key was incorrect for this question. Did he mention it to anyone? Nope. Did only a handful of students get credit for bringing it up? Yes, and only about ten out of the now 35 in the class.
My best horror story for summer classes comes from my 2013 Proposal Writing class at Southern Polytechnic State University. It was dark, stormy classroom. There were only twelve of us in a twice-a-week class period over eight weeks. The only assignment — an actual grant proposal. Seven weeks into the course, we had no idea what to do and how to actually do it. Make a fake proposal for a real company using a real grant that exists. No one had a clue how to connect the two. It wasn't so much writing proposals in the class as much as it was just bullshitting proposals to make it sound cohesive for the teacher. It was just baffling how clueless we all were and still came out with an A.
Summer classes are a compromise. They allow students to take courses to get more credit hours. While these two examples of my summer classes seem terrible, they were pretty refreshing. The professors have managed to tie everything up and I can say I walked away with a better understanding of the course material — but the methods are definitely different. A single month for a class is not inherently bad — just be prepared!
