by Julianna Alvarez
With spring break approaching and college students preparing for a whole week of no classes, spring break is the talk of the town when the time approaches. Unfortunately, with this time of era, is spring break really worth the risk to travel and gather around people?
Spring break is mostly popularized in movies in which they portray how college students spend their spring break and focus solely on their journeys and extravaganza’s. Producers display the events that take place during spring break with varieties of parties and traveling which leads to the audience watching the movie to have a depiction on how spring break is used and would want to experience the ‘unrealistic’ week full of parties and beaches. A college student from D’Youville College talks about her spring break happening the week of March 7th and she explained how she would always want to experience spring break on how they portray it in the movies, “… whenever I watched a movie that was based around spring break, I had this perception of what my spring break would look like… it would be amazing to travel for spring break and be able to reenact the scenes from the movies”. Movies play a significant role on influences individual’s on how certain situations are perceived.
With the occurrence of the viral spring break in Miami that occurred during the week of March 14-21st of 2021, college student still traveled to Miami for their spring break despite the Covid-19 outbreak and tried to enjoy their spring break just like it shows in the movies. This caused a major discussion through social media mostly from parents of college students to individuals who were affected by Covid-19, and this caused a group of people to be highly upset. For these specific groups of college students, they did not let a pandemic get in their way of their spring break as it was more important than staying home, and since classes were mostly online, they had the flexibility to be able to travel and regardless of if it was spring break or not.
With this year’s spring break some colleges are changing spring break, specifically Yale University cancelled their spring break and gave out off days throughout the semester to avoid college students travelling and decided to call those off days “Wellness Days”, this was not only to avoid college students travelling but to also give students a day to focus on their mental and physical health, but not all college student travel for spring break, a college student from NCCC stated that she uses spring break for her mental health and take the time to destress, “…with all the work that is piled up throughout the beginning of the semester, I take the time to focus on myself during spring break”, she stated during an interview.
Spring break is happening the week of March 13th-20th this year for NCCC. The ‘Student Life Activities & Workshops’ is hosting an “alternative spring break”, in which they are traveling to the Lower Florida Keys as they are working with Habitat for Humanity. With this event, college students would take advantage during their time off and helping others during that time.
Whatever is decided for the time spent during spring break, take the time to reflect, restart, and enjoy a week of no classes. Have a safe and healthy spring break!