I hate conference weekend at BYU.

I spent all day Saturday–from 10:00 a.m. until 9:00 p.m. watching conference or in transit to and from same. What this means is that 2 weeks before finals, I have a weekend where I can’t do any homework, or research for my thesis. I can’t do any grading and very little relaxing. Just when I need it the most, they take it away from me.

Why should I have to give up listening to prophets of the Lord in order to do my homework at a University run by the church? A university which supposedly encourages us to be religious and to watch conference. At the Lord’s University my brother got Friday off, ostensibly as Spring Break. That sounds like a perfect solution to me. Give me the opportunity to watch conference, and still have a weekend. It only takes one day.

When I was in Bozeman, I didn’t expect to be accomodated in watching conference, so when my school work suffered, I was able to deal with it. Nevertheless, MSU-Bozeman has a Spring Break so I was able to catch up on homework then. No such luck at BYU.

I think the issue boils down to this: The schedulers at BYU don’t care about the students. This is evidenced by the lack of Spring Break (which translates into an awful conference weekend), but also by the fact that we have finals scheduled on Saturday. What about people who work on Saturday? Naturally, they and their employers must work around the school’s lack of planning.

The excuse I always hear is that BYU has Education Week and Women’s week and all these other special events that take so much time that they have to cut corners other places. As if this somehow excused them from doing what every other University in the world is capable of–planning a school year without screwing it’s student’s. I’m not against Education week or anything, but the excuse simply doesn’t hold water.

The truth is, 4 days are spent on Education week and three days are spent for a University conference. That’s all. At MSU-Bozeman, classes start a week and a day later in January (that’s 6 school days), and yet they still have a 5-day spring break. They both get out of class on the same day for Christmas, so somehow Bozeman is able to magically get by with 4 fewer days in the year, and still not have finals on Saturday! I guess they are just smarter. For the sake of completeness, Bozeman has 3 holidays compared to 2 in Winter term, 2 instead of 3 in the Summer, and both have 4 holidays in Fall. Hmm, no difference there.

Am I asking too much? Just one day near conference. Or, perhaps a better way to think about it, one day near Easter. At BYU we apparently venerate Martin Luther King more than the risen Lord. After all, we get his day off. The only reason you would know it was Easter season on campus is from the pagan fertility symbols in the bookstore. That’s the sort of thing one would expect from a Gentile university, not a church run institution. But maybe that’s the problem–BYU is run by the Church.

I think my biggest complaint of all this, is that it causes me to feel stressed out and cranky over conference weekend, which should be a wonderful and spiritually uplifting experience. I don’t like hating conference weekend, especially when it is so easily preventable.