Much like any other Notre Dame student, I am excited for Thanksgiving. The prospect of spending time with my family and eating great food has been what has motivated me for the week or two leading up to the break. I said to myself, "Just make it past this week; then you get to go home and be lazy for a while." However, as I am presently writing this in my confined dorm room and not my living room at home, I realize that there is a problem. Surely, many will agree with me and rally to my call for a week-long Thanksgiving break. However, I am not going take the traditional argument that has certainly been raised in dining halls and dorms rooms — citing other schools, the uselessness of these two days, or the fact that many pack up and leave early anyways if they don't have classes that take attendance seriously.
Instead, I implore those that work under the dome to reflect on why a Thanksgiving break exists in the first place. It is a time for students to leave and spend time with their families, but its current structure makes that challenging for those of us not from the Midwest. Instead of leaving the weekend before Thanksgiving, we must wait until Tuesday night or Wednesday morning to leave. These, of course, are the busiest travel days of the year, causing expensive tickets and ridiculously busy airports. Both of these factors have caused many Notre Dame students to decide that they should forgo the trip home and just stay on campus or go to a friend's house nearby. Doing either of these is completely respectable, but we shouldn't have to resort to that if we don't want to. Our administration should not discourage students from going home by forcing us to travel on the busiest days of the year.
A Notre Dame education comes with a price. Ignoring the financial aspect, for most of us this price is expressed as stress. Please, don't cause any more by making us travel the day before Thanksgiving. That's just not cool.
Sean Baur
sophomore
Morrissey Manor
Nov. 21