Fair schedules

Princeton University has one of the strangest academic calendars. Like, ever. I can still remember this past summer: My friends and I had a huge bon voyage party. We went out, talked about how excited for college we were, exchanged lots of hugs and parted ways soon after. And yet for three weeks I was at home bumming around on the couch watching Family Feud as my family probably wondered what I was still doing home in early September.

This isn’t to say I don’t appreciate lengthy summers. It was pretty refreshing, in comparison to my normal two-and-half-month vacations. And I’m sure once I’m done with my first year and my first summer doing something grown up and extensive, I’ll appreciate the break. But starting school mid-September just makes the rest of the breaks equally as family- and friend-less. We have breaks when no one else does, our Thanksgiving is so short that we blink and we’re back on campus, and Intersession is oddly separated from winter break, so there’s a solid week of limbo in January.

But in fact, all of these aforementioned breaks can only be taken into account if people are even able to return home — and the reality is that a large number of students are not for financial reasons. It’s simpler for my friends in the Tri-State area, or even a little further up to Massachusetts or south to the D.C. metro area, to go home when they need or want to. Their homes are only a drive or train ticket away. But for everyone else on campus, picking up and leaving is not a simple task, and the schedule that we have only exacerbates this problem. Intuitively, plane tickets to places farther away are more expensive. But inconvenient times to fly make what’s already a hassle a total nightmare.

I purchased my Thanksgiving break ticket without my parents’ help this year, because I wanted my arrival to be a surprise. The real surprise was the dent in my wallet after this — I paid well over $400 to return to New Orleans, simply because I was forced to fly on the most popular (and hectic) days for Thanksgiving travel. Had Thanksgiving break started earlier, there would have been a noticeable change in price.

I was lucky, though. One of my friends and fellow columnists, Mizzi Gomes, wasn’t able to go home to California at all. She spent Thanksgiving with one of her roommates and returned to campus before classes resumed. “It was like a ghost town. No one was here, and there was nothing to do. Almost everything was closed — but that’s how it should be. We should all be home with our families.”

As if Thanksgiving wasn’t enough, we have the inconvenience of Intersession and its odd placement. Unlike many schools, our winter break and Intersession are completely separate entities, thanks to the super idea of exams after the holidays. While the three weeks of winter break are long enough to make the plane ticket home well worth it, the few days of Intersession — only mere weeks after dropping serious cash on a winter break ticket — makes going home unrealistic for many. Students can’t be expected to spend so much money on flying back and forth, or worse, expected to stay on campus for financial reasons. And I don’t think we are expected to do this. After all, more than 60 percent of the students here are on financial aid. But more than this, a large percentage of this student body is from places farther away like California, Texas, Florida, Georgia, etc. I’m no math whiz, but I could say this probably means a significant number of students from these places are on financial aid and could definitely use the aid of a calendar that is more financially logical.

During a discussion about education and admissions, the dean of admission acknowledged that, though here at Princeton students that are on financial aid now outweigh those that are not, this isn’t necessarily translating with the general perspective of the school. But before external perceptions can occur, internal changes must occur. A major step toward this would be in acknowledging and addressing the financial hindrance that our very own academic calendars hold, schedules we must all abide by no matter the discrepancy of our wallets.

Lea Trusty is a freshman from Saint Rose, La. She can be reached at ltrusty@princeton.edu.