By: Jin Song, SFU Student

It’s that time again! 

My alarm goes off before the sun is up. Bleary-eyed, I crawl out of bed to wait in the cold, dark morning for the bus that’s running late. At my lecture, I realized that I really should’ve studied more during reading week while frantically scribbling down the lecturer’s trigonometric integral solution.

It’s easy to take our careers as students for granted and forget that for most of history, most people were illiterate. Even today, education is out of reach for some 244 million children globally. That we can devote so much of our attention to learning new things and improving our skills is truly an honour. That’s not to say that formal education is the only path to happiness, but those who want the opportunity should be able to get it. 

Education is, at its core, a progression of the self. How glorious it is that we have access to it, alongside so many other passionate students and aided by professors who want to see us succeed?

But at the end of the day, when all else is said . . . reading breaks are nice exactly because we have the opportunity to go back to school. They wouldn’t be breaks at all without the more mundane, difficult, and academically rigorous weeks of the year.