Flipping through the summer calendar and seeing over three months of glorious, brain-decaying time, I couldn’t get enough of quarters. On paper, the quarter system sounded incredible. I would be able to take more classes and get a whole extra month of summer as an added bonus. The summer between high school and college was one of my best ever, spent vacationing, relaxing and making memories with my family and friends. Then came August, which brought on several tearful going-away parties with the very people I spent nearly all my life with. Suddenly, a vague sense of loneliness became emptiness at home and in my town, between working parents and school for my sister and best friends. The once-promising month in between my friends’ departures and my college orientation felt like a hellish eternity. I spent nearly every day alone, growing more and more anxious to get out of my small town and off to the bright prospect of college and being surrounded by people again. But once college started, I felt the strain of the quarter system in a whole new manner.
Where it seemed that my friends who were on semesters had had time to adjust to college life and classes, I felt thrown into the deep end of a pool without the ability to swim. No guidance, no time to breathe; just exams, papers and p-sets. By my third week, I had my first college “midterm,” a word that is used in the loosest sense at this school. I knew that I would have to work hard in college. I was excited by it. However, the sudden overload of work left me struggling to breathe, and I was only a few weeks into the quarter.
My mom has asked me several times if I have lighter weekends where we could squeeze in a family visit. Each time I scoff at the very concept of a “lighter” week. Once the quarter picks up during third week, it steamrolls all the way to finals. Aside from the occasional day where my schedule is somewhat manageable, often times it feels as if stopping to breathe would result in being trampled to the ground.
The quarter system continues to control our lives even when we are supposedly on break. We start late, our winter break is shorter than our peers’, our spring break rarely lines up with other schools, and we finish for the year almost a month later than everyone else. This affects us socially, and also affects our ability to get a job for the summer. Competing with other college students for limited internships and part time jobs was already difficult enough, but UChicago students are put at another disadvantage by not being able to begin working until mid to late June. Our counterparts have been available for weeks already. Our lives are controlled by the strange school schedule to which we must adhere.
The University of Chicago is known both for its quirkiness and for its sense of academic inquiry. The quarter system fits well with both of these traits. Students certainly do take more classes in a year, and in many cases this is a great thing. It allows us to be exposed to more material and to learn more about the world around us. However, taking more classes also means more exams and work in a much shorter time frame. In racing to keep up with the quarter system, it sometimes feels like we lose a bit of ourselves along the way. The mental and social well-being of the students should also be taken into account when considering the schedule for the University. Both students and administrators alike would find that a better schedule would actually lead to a more positive learning environment.
