The 2021-2022 academic year will include a four-week winter session and a spring break.

2020 saw the inaugural year of Iowa State offering a winter session to students. This window gave students an opportunity to catch up on prerequisites or work on a minor or second major. The winter session lasted from Dec. 14 to Jan. 21 and allowed students to take a max of four credits.

Every college offered a variety of prerequisite classes for students to take based on their graduation requirements. After the success of the first winter session, administrators decided to bring back the winter session for the 2021-2022 academic year.

Ann Marie VanDerZanden, associate provost for the office of the Senior Vice President and Provost, said this decision was based on success metrics faculty laid out. These metrics included how many students were enrolled in each course, if students and faculty felt the course learning outcome has been achieved, the drop rate and if the course benefit aligned with the cost of offering them.

Not only were all of the success metrics met, “surveys of students and faculty involved had an overwhelmingly positive response,” Beate Schmittmann, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, said.

Lindsey Dunlay, freshman in biology with a pre-vet track, said her winter course she took this year helped her immensely.

“Taking BIO 212 over Winter Break helped a lot; I don’t have to worry about it during the spring semester,” she said.

Regardless of the success of the first winter session, changes will be made to fit the session into a traditional school year.

“We should not believe that everything we saw in the last winter session will be the same […] The next winter session will be another experiment,” Schmittmann said.

The biggest changes to the winter session next year will be the impact on the schedule of returning to normal. VanDerZanden described these changes as being a “pretty significant impact on the calendar.”

These changes include the winter session being shortened to four weeks and students now being limited to only three credit hours due to the increased intensity of the shorter winter session.

The 2021 fall semester will remain the same after these changes. However, the 2022 spring semester will have an altered calendar to accommodate the winter session and spring break. The spring session will begin the Tuesday after Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Although the winter session will be another experiment, it is returning next year to offer students an opportunity to take extra classes. With many unanswered questions next year about life returning back to normal, VanDerZanden describes the school’s approach as “very much looking at this as we are going to crawl, walk and then run.”

Regardless of these changes, the administration hopes this winter session can be as successful as last year’s.