During winter break many students had the misfortune of having finals scheduled on December 23rd, forcing many to miss the holidays. This sparked a petition where 1600 students asked the administration to reevaluate the academic calendar.

Andrew Springer, Senator for the Journalism School, discussed what the senate is doing to address this issue: "Student senators got together in an unprecedented act with Whitney Green and Sue Yang of CCSC and ESC to talk about this and to come up with a solution. And part of the problem that we realized that wasn't in the original petition was the issue of study days."

While the current solution allows students to re-schedule their finals, this has not eased the feeling that there are not enough study days.

Springer said that, "We had originally proposed an idea that would shrink the calendar. But it became very clear that that simply wasn't going to pass. Even if it did pass, it wouldn't change the calendar next year. The only way that we could do this was to compromise with the faculty."

In the senate, faculty outnumbers students 3 to 1, making a compromise more difficult than originally thought.

"Harvard doesn't have this problem, Yale doesn't have this problem, Princeton doesn't have this problem," indicates Springer. "Why do we have this problem? Faculty say that if we move up the academic calendar to start before labor day, which is what we proposed, they wont' be able to find child care services and, in particular, young non-tenured faculty are losing time to work on their tenure."

While a preliminary solution has been reached, debates concerning the resolution to the schedule continue. Springer assure students that, "This is only the first step, we're going to keep working on study days. This is not the end, this is the beginning."