The Grinch who stole Christmas

Now I loved CHM 207, but that’s taking it too far.

The explanation behind Zumdahl’s sudden, stealthy invasion of my bookshelf has a lot to do with Princeton’s policy of placing reading period and finals week after our winter break. All of the traditional arguments against the policy hold true: We shouldn’t have to study or write papers while the rest of our friends are having fun and taunting us about it, it pushes back the term schedule which makes us have a shorter winter break than everyone else does, why does Christmas have to be ruined. The list goes on. But my Zumdahl experience demonstrates how, particularly for international students who go home or for any student who travels during winter break, the policy is ridiculously inconvenient and likely impacts our grades in some form or another.

Since my chemistry final was after the break, I packed the textbook and all my notes into my suitcase and carried that suitcase on an Air Canada flight back home to Bombay, India. Our bags got lost somewhere between Toronto, Munich and Bombay. We were annoyed, but my sister and I took this misfortune as a prime opportunity. She went into a rage about having no clothes to wear (a blatant lie — she was stealing mine) and persuaded my mother to go shopping with her and restock her entire wardrobe. I decided that there could be no better excuse in the world for not studying than my books being lost somewhere around the world in air transit, and I blissfully immersed myself in supreme laziness.

But after two weeks had gone by with no news of the wayward suitcases, the possibility of never getting them back dawned. With this in mind, my father ordered another fat, thick, heavy copy of ‘Chemical Principles’ from Amazon.com to be shipped to Bombay. But Amazon.com was clearly in league with Air Canada and was determined to spare me the necessity of studying during winter break, and days went by with no Zumdahl in the mail. My father began to panic and ordered yet another fat, dark blue ‘Chemical Principles,’ this time to be sent to Frist Campus Center.

The result is easy to predict. I picked up the book from Frist; a week later, Zumdahl finally made an appearance back in Bombay; and about two months later, Air Canada called to say they had found our bags. How did they identify them as ours? “There was this chemistry textbook in one of the bags, and your daughter’s name was written on the inside of the front cover.”

Take this either as a cosmic sign of the gods disapproving of Princeton’s policy, or of fate intervening to prevent the injustice of a student studying over winter break, or simply an indication of how inconvenient it is, particularly for international students, to have finals week after winter break. Any which way, the policy sucks.

To begin with, packing to go home for winter is a difficult procedure anyway. We cram any number of useless artifacts in aggravatingly small suitcases and studiously look away from the woman at the check-in counter while she is weighing our bags. Books are heavy. They’re annoying to carry. I’m fairly convinced that books like ‘Chemical Principles’ that are heavy enough to act as dumbbells are going to give me back problems when I’m old.

In addition, there is an inherent disadvantage to most international students who live in places like India, or indeed to any student who lives in a small town without access to the same resources that urban centers have. I love Bombay dearly, but it’s difficult to obtain good books on pan-Arabism or the problems of Athenian democracy or metaphysics when I’m there. As a result, we can either write papers that will by definition be less informed and researched than we would like, or decide on a topic for each paper we have to write before we leave campus, find the books that we think we’ll require and carry them home with us. This is Princeton. Keeping up with the homework due in two hours is more than enough to keep us occupied without adding on the papers due in a month.

As far as I know, this policy irritates enough people on campus that it at the very least deserves some revisiting. I know that these last two weeks seem bad enough without adding on finals and papers, and I know that reading period should, technically, be enough to make up for lost time over winter break. But a shift in our schedule would be beneficial to all Princeton students, and I fail to see exactly why we follow this schedule anyway. The faculty vote to keep it so they have a nice, pleasant winter break free from correcting papers and grading exams. But we are currently the only University in the whole of the United States of America to be following this inconvenient and disadvantaging policy. (Hmmm … now, what does that remind me of?) It’s time that we changed it.

Now (and I say this with complete seriousness): Does anyone want to buy a copy of ‘Chemical Principles,’ by Steven S. Zumdahl?

Camille Framroze is a sophomore from Bombay, India. She can be reached at framroze@princeton.edu.