Family weekend brought many new, or rather, old faces to campus.
It's too bad that nice break from the ordinary had to come at the end of a three-day week immediately following fall break.
This is just one of the many oddities presented by the University's academic calendar. And because the schedule is set for three years in advance, many seem to think that it cannot be changed.
It should be.
By placing fall break and family weekend back-to-back, the schedulers have made the latter somewhat meaningless, since many students use the days off for fall break to visit family.
This would be very easy to change for next year.
Currently family weekend, fall break and homecoming are scheduled for consecutive weekends in October. Instead, fall break should be moved up to the first weekend in the month -- logically coinciding with Columbus Day -- with family weekend two weeks later. Then, homecoming could be scheduled for two weeks later, on the weekend of Nov. 11.
Under this plan, each event would be spread out, which makes each of them worthwhile. Additionally, it would place the homecoming weekend in sync with the Harvard football game -- a game that has decided the Ivy League title the last four seasons.
In general, Penn should be more cognizant about spacing its University-wide "holidays." They should be laid out with students in mind, and grouping them together takes away from their benefits.
This spring the Undergraduate Assembly ran into an administrative wall when they proposed a thoughtful plan to move up the beginning of classes to a more reasonable time in September. Instead of opening this up for discussion, the University stuck with it's "set-in-stone" calendar.
Just because it's been planned for a long time does not mean it's right.
