As the crisp autumn air settles in and the leaves begin to turn, students at NYU are greeted with a single day off on Oct. 14 — billed as a fall break. However, this fleeting respite does little to provide students the chance to visit home, let alone time to prepare for or recover from midterms.

For many colleges, fall break serves as an opportunity to go back home for the first time since the start of the semester. Yet here at NYU, where we’re only allotted one day off for Indigenous Peoples’ Day, returning home is difficult to swing. For students from nearby cities or states, one day may suffice, but for the majority — particularly those from other parts of the country and international students — the time and financial burdens of travel render this opportunity nearly impossible to justify, with some students avoiding the prospect of traveling altogether.

A straightforward remedy would be to extend the break period by just a couple of days, better encouraging a trip home. But unfortunately, while possibly enough to incentivize domestic students to make the journey, international students face a greater buy-in — for them, it’s likely that no feasible extension would be long enough to merit the plane ticket.

International students may take fall break as an opportunity to travel domestically to different areas of the country, but the shortness of the break may make the trip less appealing. There are some who find the break too short to travel at all, viewing Thanksgiving and winter break as better opportunities for their travels. 

So, if NYU’s fall break fails to accommodate student travel, it could at least serve as a valuable period for midterm preparation. Unfortunately, that is not the case. While an extra day of preparation and recovery is always welcome, it’ll be too little too late for some students. NYU’s midterm schedule often stretches from around two weeks before fall break to two weeks after — meaning that students with early midterms cannot capitalize on this day off.

To better serve its students, NYU should consider reevaluating the midterm assessment period altogether — creating a designated time frame in the weeks following the second Monday of October for teachers to assign their midterm assessments to ensure that every student makes the most of their day off. Although there is something to be said about having that extra day to decompress following a busy midterm week, students’ ability to study over break shouldn’t be determined by whatever courses they happen to enroll in.

Barring change to either of these concerns, the university could work to keep the language employed across the academic calendars consistent. Out of the 16 total study away campuses, the academic calendar at NYU’s Washington Square campus is one of only four that refers to this stretch of time off as “Fall Break.” The other three campuses — Paris, Abu Dhabi and Shanghai — each feature longer breaks ranging from two days to an entire week off. The six campuses that observe Indigenous Peoples Day don’t refer to Oct. 14 as a “fall break,” so what makes us so special? The least that NYU could do is edit the language to reflect the message being sent by these other campuses — a single day to ourselves does not constitute a fall break.

Contact Grayson Stotz at [email protected].