The Ticker - Features

“Welcome back to school, I hope you enjoyed your winter break!”

Above is a phrase that I’ve used approximately 10 times within the last two weeks.
It goes hand in hand with the students’ reactions of having to start the spring semester, some of which are splattered all over Facebook. My favorite one: “So-and-so is disgusted about having to go back to school.”

I’ve recently found myself wondering why the above reaction is so common among us students. It’s not because we must unwillingly return to eating the rubbery Baruch cafeteria food or endure verbal abuse from the security guards when we forget our ID cards. It has nothing to do with having to trek up the four flights of escalators just because you don’t want to be “that guy who takes the elevator to the fifth floor” or having to anticipate semester-long pelvic pain from the metal turnstiles, all because the magnetic stripe on your Baruch ID mysteriously deactivated itself (blame your MetroCard for that one).

All joking aside, when we return to Baruch to start a brand-spankin’ new semester, we must also return to pseudo-adulthood. Baruch upholds an “all work, no play” environment, which has made enjoying the typical college experience — the one where every student gains the freshman 15 from drinking Keystone Light, eats pizza til their insides turn to marinara and has an equal amount of embarassing beer-goggle hookup stories and blackout stories — that much harder, if not impossible.

Think about it: our library turns into a 24-hour motel during midterms and finals, and I’m saddened to think that most students know the smell of those faded, cube-like couches better than they do their own bed. Our cafeteria tables (what little we have) become makeshift desks, with finance graphs and PowerPoint print outs strewn all over them during Club Hours. How many students do you see wearing business suits or attire daily? Why is the multi-purpose room nearly empty when USG throws a party? WHY DOESN’T ANYONE SMILE AT BARUCH?! All these ridiculous questions can only lead to one answer: Baruch students’ work and study ethics can be compared to the Energizer bunny: they keep going, and going, and going.

 Winter break gave us — or those students who didn’t attend intersession — just five short weeks to transform from being a student to being an actual human. We needed that time to unwind from fall semester’s deadlines and due dates, go out and party with our friends, actually get a full night’s worth of sleep, eat a real meal. This all shouldn’t stop at the start of spring semester.

As college students, we should exercise our right to not have to think it’s the end of the world if we miss our 9:30 AM class the next day because of a few (or many) drinks the night before. We should excercise our right to not have to use our 500-page text book as a pillow. As college students, we have the right to make a case to the professor to extend that due date, all because there’s just too much work to do and not enough hours in a Baruch student’s day. We have the right to be humans and have fun during the semester, instead of being “all work, no play” studying machines.

 What Baruch students need is a balanced, “some work, some play” agenda. I encourage you to enjoy a Thursday night getting ripped off at Fitz, skip a class or two to go shopping, even check out the game room for a quick game of table tennis. Whatever it takes for Baruch students to have good, clean, REAL fun, fun that evokes smiles and laughs and good feelings, do it.

“Welcome back from winter break, I hope you enjoy your spring semester!”