Opinion

As an experience, summer school is not one I regret

Since the beginning of my collegiate career, summer school has been something that is recommended to me for multiple reasons. 

Generally people recommend summer school to help a student get ahead in classes, raise their GPA, or catch them up on courses to help students graduate at the expected time. As a student who is also an athlete during my track season I usually end up dropping a class solely because I am not able to attend all of my classes with our busy track schedule. 

On most occasions we leave on a Wednesday and track meets last through the duration of the weekend so I will usually miss half of the week’s assignments from Wednesday through Friday. 

In certain cases, depending on the professor I am able to make up assignments for full credit. In other situations teachers do not give chances to make up work or are difficult to get into contact with outside of the hours when they are in class. Sometimes classes don’t go as planned, simply because I have plainly missed out on too much information that I will not be able to recover. As a result I drop classes so that my grade point average will not be negatively affected by the things I am not able to control.

This summer has been the first summer in my life where I have taken any type of class and it has been a challenging experience. Going from taking the summer as a time of vacation and fun into it becoming a scholastic summer did not sound like it would be a difficult transition. I’ve found this is be more difficult than I thought. In my specific classes I have been required to do more work and writing than I have ever done. I am currently taking communication law and ethics, a biology lab and a news practicum course. Between these three classes I have had assignments due every day. I did not initially expect this, but when thinking about the concept that these courses usually take a semester but are being compacted into four weeks, it makes sense. The free time that I usually have in the summer to do the things I enjoy have instead been spent on consistently writing papers and doing assignments that are required for each course.

Though summer school has been difficult, it has helped teach me to be more diligent in doing all of my assignments. During the normal school year I have a tendency to become lackadaisical in doing and keeping up with all of my assignments. This is due in part by how often I miss class and also all of the other things I am involved in throughout the course of a regular semester. Considering the fact that summer school requires a greater concentration of assignments while also having less students in each class, there is not much room to be lazy. 

With this said, I have improved at writing down assignments I know need to be done, and setting alarms to assure I meet the deadlines of my assignments. Overall, though I do not enjoy summer school, it has enhanced my focus and the way I go about school. 

As an experience, summer school is not one I regret.