Like an anchovy mushroom pizza, summer school isn’t for everybody. Sometimes they’re the only toppings students can choose from, and they have to force that anchovy mushroom pizza past their gag reflex. The even harder part of eating that pizza is keeping it from coming back up. In summer school I had to tell myself one week into the workload that it would be over soon. The light at the end of the tunnel cometh, and the credits I would earn in those five weeks would be worth the summer I gave up. 

I am not new to needing to do so much in so little time.

While I was in the Army, I was a full-time student and a full-time soldier. There were some days I had to give up a good grade so that I could fulfill my duties. I do not, under any circumstances, recommend working full time and being a full time student. Spread the workload and the schoolwork out evenly so that you can be attentive to both disciplines. This past summer I took both summer I and II courses, each with a seven-credit-hour load. Eight of the 14 credit hours were from the Spanish 1 and Spanish 2 courses. That’s like getting double anchovies on that pizza. 

Students take summer school because they want to get ahead of the game or because they need to play catch-up.

This pizza is not for everyone. It’s extremely time-consuming, and the first mistake will be going into summer school thinking that a normal length class condensed into five weeks is going to be a breeze. The workload is heavy and I found myself two weeks into the course work at two o’clock in the morning on a Wednesday night downing my fourth cup of coffee because I had my mid-term in six hours. These nights are normal, and the 18-hour coma I would slip into after three exams and a cumulative final became normal as well. 

This type of work takes a large amount of dedication. The urge to go to the registrar and request a drop slip will became increasingly overwhelming day by day. Coffee and oxygen began to serve the same purpose. For five weeks I was no longer bound by the laws of physics, but by the laws of summer school. Time is only relative to the DiGiorno pizza I had thrown in the oven. I found that the four-day school week had quickly morphed into a 96-hour long Monday. I suddenly began to understand how it felt to be falling down a bottomless pit of despair. Not purgatory. Summer school.

Still, after all the blood shed and tear-drenched homework I had to endure for five weeks, I saw see the light at the end of the pit. A few credits and a less than enthusiastic jump in my GPA later, I could rest easy knowing that I had decimated four less courses, and that my liberal arts degree is now just a few more thousands of dollars away. 

Caleb Martin is a mass communication sophomore.