Welcoming back a fresh semester with open arms, who isn’t excited to kick off the first week with the standard course guidelines and the limited number of assignments, leaving us at ease, which easily chisels out a surplus of room to be “sylly.”
However, there was a major shift between the fall and spring semesters, pertaining to the distribution of work during the first week. In August, students recall “rushing out of their dorms nearly every night without the need to worry about a due date,” but when arriving back in January it seemed a different set of expectations had arrived.
The opportunities to go out were available, yet dismissed as students strived to mold their winter break mindset back into a solid routine. Resulting in the weekday nights out, being shelved and left behind to build up fragments of dust, so the course-mode agenda could be implemented.
Whether it be the groove of summer, creating a lagging persistence, for both staff and students to dive into work from the jump, during the fall or the spring’s colder temperatures consuming any going out the motivation that is left, it appeared “sylly” week had come to a halt.
After discussing the first week ordeal with several PSU students, it seemed each individual viewed their first week through varied perspectives. When speaking with Sean Gillespie – a first year student – about his “sylly” week experience he affirmed,
“Personally, it was pretty chill, but a lot of my friends had a crazy amount of homework during “sylly” week.
Sean Gillespie- Penn State first-year student
Perhaps the first week’s overload wasn’t exclusively caused by the work that was being assigned, but rather the dire obligation to settle back into an academic environment. Summer break provides a substantial number of weeks to curate a hankering for a crystallized routine, but winter break reminds us what it feels like to vedge out with zero expectation.
So, when it officially became time to delve back into the groove of college studies there was a greater hesitation to want to. Leading “sylly” week to become “syllabyss” week, feeling as if we were suffocating under the several Canvas notifications warning us that there was an assignment due at 11:59 p.m.
Evidently, attending college comes packaged with the presupposition of completing an educational workload responsibility, in order to successfully receive a degree. There is no denying that college students are geared up to achieve the tasks at hand, but we’re also daringly attesting that, at times, it can be overwhelming.
The submerged emotions of hunting for a time slot, to catch a brain break, doesn’t mean you’re not a diligent student or triumphant accomplisher, rather it’s displaying you’re in tune with yourself and understand how you function on the basis of change. Syllabus week isn’t utterly a moment for students to only go out and party, but a reset period to buckle down and turn our cognitive mindsets back on.
After all, beyond the academic lists our names land on, through our determined efforts and the grand number identifying our GPA’s, we’re human beings. There is rationale behind needing to let loose and be “sylly,” as a means to calibrate our weeks ahead, entailing a semester of academic prosperity.
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