the story is that they were helping some singer, and now have to repeat a year in college/university (due to not spending enough time on it i guess). and they are talking about that.
It's a break, ideally it takes up a full mora "time slice". I think technically it's called 'gemination', but the only reasonably close english example I'm seeing is 'cattail', where you have the pause mid-word. Kinda difficult to draw an analogy between a monotonic language and a stress-focused one.
