Written by: Gene Cole, Opinions Editor

During the past week, I’ve spent an unnecessarily large amount of time writing apology notes to a classmate over a group presentation, because I’d yet to finish my section of the PowerPoint in time due to some other assignments. While I’d be panicking on any other week of school, reading break was thankfully here to save me. Without the time required to travel to and attend my lectures, I could finally recover from everything I was behind in.

But to those people who reserve reading break for a big trip, I feel like you may be misusing this time a bit. The amount of work we have to do as post-secondary students is massive, and a week out of class is often just enough to keep us from drowning in stress and textbooks.

SFU’s learning commons recommends that students spend two to three hours per week studying outside of lectures for each credit we’re taking that semester. This can add up to at least 18 hours for full-time students — and at least 30 hours with a maximum course load — to be working on our own time to learn and practice, which becomes more difficult when you have a job, family responsibilities, or long travel times to campus cutting into your schedule. Reading break gives us a time to allocate our hours more freely, and be as constructive as we can on our own clocks.

Sometimes, this reorganization means you put a little extra time into the newly empty spots where your classes usually are. Now, you can fill up your “lecture blocks” with better constructive learning time. If you aren’t as behind as I usually am, it means you get a bunch of extra free time by just maintaining your normal study schedule, and you can at least relax a bit. We’re in school to succeed, and reading break is a tool for achieving that.

This isn’t to say you shouldn’t travel if you think you can afford it, or if you need to for the sake of family. If you can somehow get ahead of your work enough to take that time away, then power to you. But given how much time you need to put into school to begin with, you’re either going to be packing a lot of extra work into a short period of time before you leave — something the SFU Learning Commons also recommends against — or putting yourself way behind. Alternately, you could maybe plan to do some work while you’re on your trip, but the last thing you want to do is go back to a hotel room to work on a research paper.

I realize how preppy and paranoid I sound, and it’s definitely still important to make some free time to relax. After all, I would be lying if I said I hadn’t used some parts of this week to visit friends and cross things off my Netflix list. But this is a week for reading, not from reading. Take a safer bet and buy your plane tickets after finals.