Daytona Beach, Las Vegas, Cancun and the Bahamas are just a few of the most popular destinations for college students on Spring Break. This year, spring break will look a little different.
Instead of the usual consecutive nine-day break, this year it will be broken up into two four-day weekends and one mid-week break. Modified spring break days will be Feb. 17, March 4, 5, 15 and 16.
Dr. Sarah Neal, head of the AU task force, explained that a decision was made in early November to create a modified Spring Break schedule to limit travel to tourist destinations.
“The idea is not ‘no travel.’ The idea is [no] hot tourist destinations where you have people from all over the United States congregating,” said Neal.
Neal mentioned that data mapping from Spring Break 2020 shows the spread from Florida up to the Midwest because of its tourist popularity. This data was used in deciding how to conduct Spring Break 2021.
“We use the past to be predictive of the future,” said Neal.
While many other schools are redistributing the break in a similar way, some are cutting spring break altogether. AU’s task force took this into consideration when deciding how to handle the break. Neal explained that the schools who took the approach of nixing breaks had reports saying that it was “brutal for everybody.”
Many students are approaching the modification positively and are thankful for still having short breaks throughout the semester.
“I think there are a lot of advantages to having modified spring break,” stated sophomore Logan Wuertley. “People get tired throughout the semester. Instead of having just one week where we all have off to recoup, it’s throughout the semester so it keeps us all more motivated longer.”
Wuertley not only thinks the modified schedule is a good idea this year, but is in favor of keeping it in the coming years.
“When we had the one week, it gave me a bunch of energy all at once, but then I’d crash before finals.” He continued, “Now it feels like the rest is spread out, so it feels like I have much more energy and I feel like this semester is going a lot more smoothly.”