Spring Weekend

I’m going to take a slight break from the schoolwork (as I type this here at the library as it pushes 5 in the morning, and the place isn’t empty by a long shot) and let people know about a fun annual event many colleges have as the semesters wind down called spring weekend. I never got involved with the planning for a spring weekend personally, but the events schools put on are generally pretty worthwhile and work toward building community at lots of places that, as most students find, can be rather impersonal.

Spring weekend celebrations are usually ways for student councils to justify the use of student life fees that otherwise go unspent (thus, all the more reason to take advantage of what’s offered). They usually revolve around parties with food (and sometimes booze for the 21+ crowd), games, student group performances, and the annual spring concert.

It’s always funny hearing about the spring concert while attending a place that attracts hundreds of shows each night throughout the area, but it’s still really neat to walk out of the library and step foot in a student center to be surrounded by colleagues taking in something completely nonacademic for just a few hours before the study grind continues. Of course, when our school announced the acts for this year’s show, there was an uproar over the supposed lack of diversity in attracting bands that cater to a rather homogeneous crowd.

I’m biased, mostly because I like the bands selected, but also because I can see through the event as not just another on-campus concert, but rather one of the few ways we can come together as a student body.

College can be a very impersonal time. Even if you make a bunch of really great friends (through classes, housing, extracurricular activities), chances are pretty good that you’ll never meet anywhere near everyone. To be honest, the same was true for me in high school and I still had a really good bunch of friends. But for a few moments, it’s still nice to come together as a group to bask in the fact that we’re all students at the same place, going to the same classes and readying for the same exams.

At some places, it’s the weekend football game or the big midnight mania basketball rally. At other places, it’s something like sitting in a packed library on a Sunday night toiling through fifty pages worth of term papers. Though completely different, both bring the feeling of a collective struggle. Spring weekend reminds me of this, and also reminds me that college is temporary and it’s best to take all of these opportunities in.