The first day of the new year should not be the last day of winter break, but for Harvard students, unfortunately, it usually is. If you had gone to almost any college or university in the country, today you would likely be spending time at home with family, traveling, or simply taking some time to recover from the stresses of student life. But you chose Harvard; today, you study in the cold, morbid Cambridge winter.

Under the awkward and ill-conceived Harvard College calendar, undergraduates are asked to return to Harvard by Jan. 2 for reading period, a soft-landing for exam period consisting of mandatory review sessions, feverish work on a final paper, and various required course meetings. It doesn’t take much to see how unhappy students are under the current schedule. Only days after toasting to a new year full of fresh starts and new beginnings, we trudge back to Cambridge to rehash a semester’s worth of course material, anxious about our papers and exams and angry about our short winter break.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. In the spring of 2004, a University-wide Committee on Calendar Reform chaired by Pforzheimer University Professor Sidney Verba ’53 voted 18-1 in favor of calendar reform. While then we criticized the proposal on this page, one too many January chills have changed our minds, and, we hope, will change Harvard’s mind as well in the very near future. Institutionally stubborn though it may be, Harvard ought to scrap the current calendar once and for all, moving reading period, final papers, and final exams before winter vacation.

A winter break of less than two weeks is simply not enough to rejuvenate the student body after a grueling semester of cram sessions, all-nighters, and extracurricular meetings. Life at Harvard, as at any demanding college, is stressful. More time to spend with family, in bed, or just existing outside Harvard’s Ivy gates, would do wonders for the collective sanity of the College. With papers and exams to worry about, many Harvard students barely get to enjoy what little vacation time they do have. Getting the first semester’s work completely out of the way would allow for a legitimate winter break.

While not all students attend class during reading period, almost all foreign language classes do hold mandatory sessions during at least the first week. The current schedule discourages students from taking foreign language courses or other math or science courses that require attendance during reading period. Moving reading period before break would provide a more equal winter vacation for all students in the College, ensuring that no one’s winter break is cut short because of the courses in which they’re enrolled.

Although the vast majority of American colleges and universities have already recognized the advantages of pre-vacation final exams and a humane winter break, some have argued that we should not abandon our unique calendar in favor of some more conventional scheme. On the contrary, the uniqueness of our calendar is part of what makes it so problematic. Many summer jobs and internships begin in early or mid-May, the time when most schools let out. Because most Harvard students must wait until late May to leave, we often miss a good deal of enriching summer experiences. Moreover, while most schools start classes in early September, we begin much later in the month, making it difficult to cross-register with MIT or other colleges or graduate schools that have a “normal” schedule. Aligning our schedules would help alleviate these problems.

As the Committee on Calendar Reform found several years ago, calendar change cannot be achieved without sacrifice. Reading period may need to be shortened a bit, and we will likely have to kiss late-September starts goodbye in favor of a post-Labor Day start date. But let go we will; these were traditions that weren’t meant to last, and we should no longer justify them with an irrelevant nostalgia.

In the end, the benefits of a calendar switch far outweigh the costs. With a longer and more relaxed winter vacation, easier cross-registration, enhanced access to summer jobs and internships, and—dare we say it—some peace of mind, the new calendar could do more to improve student life at the College than nearly any reform in recent memory. Let’s just hope the next University president hasn’t made travel plans for intersession 2008.