Cristian Rodriguez

With COVID still going strong, a majority of colleges decided to go without a spring break at all. For many schools, the idea has been to prevent students going out and possibly catching the virus. Wellness days instead encourage students to stay on campus or at home for the semester. While the reasoning is understandable, Wellness Days at Penn State have drawbacks.

With only three wellness days, we’ve lost two days off compared to having a Spring break. Depending on a student’s schedule, certain wellness days may not affect their schedule at all if they don’t have any classes on that day as well.

Professors have also had to change their own teaching schedules to accommodate for the wellness days. This in turn can disrupt the rhythm that courses get into.

Students who are working at jobs or internships are feeling the brunt of this burnout. Many students are still working on these days, making it so that they can’t fully relax on what should be a day off.

With these problems, as well as students unable to safely socially interact, the possibility of students becoming burnt out and unmotivated can become much more common. Even with Penn State giving different ways to help accommodate for this, these solutions may not be effective for certain students.

Other schools have decided to keep their spring break but with a few changes. One change was to push spring break to the middle of the semester, and having classes turn fully online afterwards which would prevent the spread of the virus in the college.

Another solution is incentivising students to stay at home or in their dorms for spring break. The University of California at Davis did this in the way of 75$ grants, where students would apply for the grants and some of the students would be selected. While these ideas may seem more appealing, we still have to wait and see if these colleges are successful with their ideas, as spring break hasn’t yet happened for them.

Since COVID is such a rare type of problem for the colleges in the United States, it’s understandable that there wasn’t a set solution beforehand, and it was clear ahead of time that there would be drawbacks to wellness days. With that being said, colleges should begin to prepare ahead of time for the possibility of lockdowns in the future regardless of the reasoning.