A professor teaches his class. Credit: Courtesy of MCT

A professor teaches his class.
Credit: Courtesy of MCT

Summer school. Say it. Say those two words. Summer school. Stretch out the “s” in a long serpentine sound. Summer school.

It rhymes with separation, strangulation and sadism.

It was this that I willfully disregarded upon enrolling in classes at Ohio State for summer term 2014. Now the summer final exams are coming in one week and I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that these classes have been completely worth the strain. But I’ll never take summer classes again.

I enrolled in four summer classes, hoping that it will let me graduate a semester early and get what every other out-of-state student at OSU wants: a way around paying so much money for tuition.

That is what makes it all worth it.

So, with a free May Session class from having been enrolled Spring Semester, what could possibly go wrong?

Time can go wrong.

When a college class is condensed into nearly half as much time as a semester-long class, you’re left with very little time to waste.

If you sit back and think about it, this is awful because college is all about wasting time. Wasting time having fun, wasting time with friends and wasting time doing things that are only really a waste of time in the eyes of one’s inner workaholic.

Now, the amount of time I have had on my hands has also been reduced by the two new jobs I started over the summer.

I have been working 28 hours per week for most of the summer, and I hopped into this under the assumption that my summer classes would all be easy.

After all, summer looked like an excellent time to finish up some of my GECs. I can tell you that not all GECs are equal, and the biggest surprise came from the art class I took in order to fill up my GEC art requirement.

Art 2100, beginning drawing, is all about learning the fundamentals of sketching and drawing lines and shading.

In order to do this, you have to learn the fundamentals of spending a dozen or so hours in Hayes Hall sketching together your final projects, including an all-nighter that I’ve planned out for tonight. A few hours of sketching after I finish typing this.

I can’t complain; learning to draw is a great skill. But the condensed nature of summer courses means that you have to pick these supposedly easy classes much, much more wisely.

Summer classes also teach you time management.

And one great way to manage your time? Only take summer classes if you absolutely have to.