As I said goodbye to my parents at New York’s LaGuardia airport this past Sunday, my mom’s eyes filled with tears, as they usually do, and I reminded her I would be back home again in just three short weeks. Then I heard what I was saying. Why am I traveling half way across the country another time to go back to school for only three weeks?

These three weeks leading up to winter break have to be the most awkward, frustrating and jam-packed weeks of the semester.

First, these are the weeks when most of the students are busy registering for classes. Although the insanity of the enrollment system deserves a column of its own, it is one of the reasons for the chaos that exists on campus during this stretch of time in Madison. Many of my friends have compared the online registering system to a drug addiction: you just can’t stop.

No, really, today I found myself rushing through my shower to run back and check the timetable as soon as the webpage had refreshed. My friends stop in the library on their way to class to see if any classes have opened up since they left their apartments. Students plead with professors via e-mail and stop in at office hours to get the numbers to register for their classes. This is only the beginning of the craziness that is UW.

Second, it has started to get colder. No, it’s not as cold as it will be second semester (let’s not think about that right now), but it is significantly colder than before Thanksgiving break. Here in lies the dilemma: tough it out in that infamous black fleece or graduate to your winter coat.

Sporting your winter coat poses a problem for the rest of the bitter cold winter, when even that coat will seem less than satisfactory for the below zero temperatures. Also, it is during these three weeks that the different lecture halls and buildings have not all decided how to regulate their heat. One of my friends today came back in a full sweat from a class in Grainger; her lecture hall had the heat blasting because of the onset of some of the coldest weather this semester.

So you bundle up and sweat both on your way to class and while in class, or you brave the cold and risk frostbite and a runny nose.

Third and last, everything that interested you pre-Thanksgiving is boring and repetitive. Faced with upcoming finals, we all have to “buckle down” and do the reading we have been putting off since September. Those long-term projects are now next week projects, and all of sudden we all have to figure out how, exactly, to research through the UW library.

Along with all of this schoolwork, we do not even get a reading week, like many other universities. Many schools have a full week in between the end of classes and exams to study and finalize projects and do overdue readings. Here at UW we just jump right into the swing of finals, at 7:45am, to be exact.

Is there any way to solve these problems? A way to get rid of the semester itch? A way to stop daydreaming about anywhere with weather above 65 degrees?

Debatable.

Obviously, we can’t reschedule Thanksgiving. We can’t completely change the enrollment system. We can’t cancel final exams. We can, however, beg and plead for at least a little bit of a change.

Why not give us a reading week to catch up on our work from the semester? If professors and TA’s knew about this before the semester began they could schedule accordingly. This would assure that the semester did not expand to remove part of our winter break. Perhaps if the administration prohibited even fifth-year seniors from registering until after finals, these three weeks would be less chaotic, and people could obsess over the timetable when they didn’t have other responsibilities like papers and exams.

These few adjustments would make the upcoming three weeks a little more pleasant. We aren’t asking for anything drastic, just a little more time to gather ourselves together: a less rushed, frantic end to our semester. So instead of cramming all month at the library, taking a few exams within a few hours of one another and then quickly packing and traveling home for the holidays, we would have a little more time to prepare for our exams while having something resembling a life. Until then, hang on for the ride the rest of this semester is sure to be.

Emily Friedman ([email protected]) is a sophomore intending to major in journalism.