When you received your acceptance letter from Northeastern, your decision to accept meant you would have to adapt to a school schedule very different from other colleges and universities. While most of your friends would toil in school for just four years, you would have to match that with five – and almost no summers off.

Students here accepted that fact, hoping the “real world” co-op experience would make up for the lack of vacation time. With the new summer sessions running seven weeks and classes Monday through Thursday, some are reconsidering that decision.

Take a yearly-cycle for a spring semester co-op student; You begin your co-op Jan. 1, sometimes earlier. You have no spring break and you have possibly three days off before you start the next semester. Depending on finals, you have roughly two and a half weeks off before you are back to school for the fall, where you will remain in classes for the next 15 weeks, with another two-week (possibly shorter) break before you start it all over again.

So count it up – four to five weeks of vacation time. Compare this to a normal semester university calendar where all students get one week off for spring break, the entire summer off, as well as their winter holiday break. Most of them do not have to come back to school until late January. All this adds up to Northeastern students being tired and overworked.

So, cry us a river, right? When Northeastern switched over to semesters the students were finally promised they would be learning over a longer period of time, thus making their education more valuable. And it worked. The fall and spring semesters were great, and Northeastern students finally felt “normal” in the college swing of things.

But no one prepared them for the summer semesters from hell. Two classes, for the most part every day and for an hour and 40 minutes each session. This is learning? This is more effective? We think not.

Can professors really teach the same class in seven weeks as they teach in 15? Some students are going over a chapter a day, in courses that are valuable to their education. You’re saying this isn’t harmful to the learning process?

So what should NU do? Go back to the quarter system? Maybe we should have five classes per fall and spring semester and eliminate the summer all together, except for those students who are catching up. We don’t know the solution. It’s not our job.

Northeastern students are paying a gratuitous amount of money to this institution with, at the very least, a promise they are getting the highest quality of education in return. Seven weeks for a core class isn’t high quality – it’s the easy way out.

On NU’s behalf, conducting an NU pulse survey to gauge student reaction is a start. Convincing everyone around here that this whole semester idea was worth “the switch” will take a lot more time – time students don’t have.