In October of last year, an idea was being circulated around the academic senate. This idea was the winter intersession, a way to include more classes during the wintertime to solve a bottleneck in the biology department. This would include the changing of the entire calendar, either shifting it weeks forward or backward in order to make time for these classes.

Since then, progress has been made to begin seeing this plan become reality within BC. A “Winter Intersession Task Force” (BCWITF) has been made for the purpose of surveying students and faculty on whether the idea of the winter intersession would be appealing to them or not.

“We know that some faculty would love to teach an intersession and some others wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole because they use the break to recover from the grueling 60-80 hour work weeks and the majority are somewhere in between the two extreme views. The student interest is probably similar in distribution. We’ll find out with the survey.” Nick Strobel, president of the Academic Senate stated.

In addition, the taskforce has been researching what other factors could help contribute to the implementation of this change.

These include looking for other scheduling bottlenecks, identifying and exploring concerns from BC constituency groups, researching admissions and financial aid issues, assess the multiple winter intersession models proposed, and share BC specific issues with the district.

By April 22, the BCWITF will make their recommendation to the academic senate deciding the validity of the plan.

Then, they will vote on the recommendation, or potentially hold it off until next year to decide if it needs more time.

The earliest the intersession could realistically be implemented would be the 2023-2024 according to Nick Strobel, stating “As of now, there is no set plan to do a winter intersession.”