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For a school that loves Google Calendar, Harvard’s fall academic calendar is a scheduling nightmare.

From an incomplete syllabus week to the lack of breaks until Thanksgiving, the calendar makes fall semester a sprint. Rather than a timeline that sustains genuine learning, students are left vulnerable to burnout.

It’s time to overhaul the whole thing.

From the very first week of the term, the calendar fails students. Because Harvard starts the semester after Labor Day, the first day of school is a Tuesday or Wednesday — making syllabus week completely uneven across courses. Students barely have a chance to settle in before they’re thrown into an irregular, staggered schedule where no one is quite sure if the semester has really begun.

The rest of the semester feels like a marathon. Harvard does not have a fall break of any kind. The closest we get is Indigenous Peoples’ Day — a single Monday off in mid-October that barely disrupts the relentless stretch of classes, papers, midterms, and problem sets. The absence of a real mid-semester pause creates an endless churn: class to midterms to more class to finals, with no real moment for students to catch their breath.

This class schedule leaves students burned out, unsupported by a structure that seems to assume endurance is a sign of excellence rather than a recipe for exhaustion.

Then, in November — right when students think they might get a break — the schedule becomes even more chaotic. After Harvard-Yale, Harvard packs two days of classes at the start of the week — something our New Haven counterparts notably don’t do. After three days of Thanksgiving break (not counting the weekend), Harvard insists on bringing everyone back for three more days of class.

This awkward partitioning creates an academic limbo. Many professors cancel class; others don’t. Some classes get skipped entirely, while others have no choice but to end early. It becomes difficult to plan, and everyone loses. Students traveling long distances may have to choose between missing valuable class time and paying dramatically inflated travel costs.

And that financial burden is real. Flights around the holidays are already expensive, but the rigid requirement to return on the Sunday after Thanksgiving for a Monday class can cost hundreds of dollars more than traveling on flexible dates. Harvard’s calendar effectively penalizes students for wanting to spend time with their families.

And then, after all this, students are rewarded with four days of reading period. Weekends should never be counted towards time we’re “given” by the college to prepare. A reading period this short is not a buffer — it’s a countdown clock. Students spend their Thanksgiving “break” doing work so they don’t drown during reading period, which means the holiday ceases to be a break at all. There is no time to recover, reflect, or prepare thoughtfully. Instead, students return from Thanksgiving already stressed, already behind, and already bracing for finals.

All of this happens within the broader storm of fall semester stress: freshmen comping clubs at a dizzying pace, sophomores adjusting to new housing and blocking groups, seniors writing theses. The academic calendar should help support students through this — at minimum, it should not make things worse. But Harvard’s current system actively intensifies every pressure students face.

Harvard has changed the calendar before. Beginning in 2009, the University synchronized calendars across its schools to strengthen collaboration between them. That change — including a shorter reading period — proved the academic schedule isn’t some immovable tradition, but a set of choices the University can revise when it wants to. That precedent matters: Harvard changed the calendar so students could widen their academic exploration. Now, it ought to do the same to further support student learning.

The message built into the current structure is unmistakable: speed matters more than comprehension. But that approach comes at a cost. Without time to process material, step back from the onslaught of assignments, or prepare meaningfully for assessments, students end up going through the motions rather than learning. A chaotic calendar produces shallow understanding, rushed work, and an academic culture driven by survival instead of curiosity.

Until then, the fall semester will continue to feel less like an educational journey and more like an unending sprint. And students deserve better from Harvard than a calendar designed for burnout.

L.A. Karnes ’28, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a double concentrator in the Comparative Study of Religion and Government in Mather House.