2008 Woodie Awards
Snow keeps students from class, but parking not a problem
Sara McIntosh
Issue date: 2/6/07 Section: Viewpoints
- Page 1 of 2 next >
After spending the majority of my morning watching intently to various news media outlets both Thursday and Friday, I find the situation with our university's decision to remain open unfair to the majority of the student body. We all know that there has been a major housing issue with incentives for students to move off campus. That being said, allowing school to remain open is making the commute to school a major headache for all students who do not live on campus.
Yesterday, when I arrived to school, the parking was a breeze only because many students made the conscientious choice to stay home and not make the trek in unfavorable road conditions. Something I noticed immediately was that the parking lots were not cleared from snow and definitely had ice underneath. I heard periodically throughout the school day of people losing control temporarily or just plain old fishtailing in their attempts to get into the unusually vacant parking lots.
Granted, there were crews pouring salt onto the concrete steps near the library, but that was not a common occurrence all over campus. Large patches of snow-covered ice lined the sidewalks between Crisp Hall, Clement and Humanities which gives students another hazard to worry about when trying to get to classes on time. So, if you survived the commute and trying to get into the parking lot, you needed to worry and walk cautiously for fear of falling on the cold, hard, ice-lined sidewalks.
Let me expand further on the notion of these sidewalks. Icewalks is a more fitting term seeing that there was little to no area that was not overwhelmingly iced over during my trek to and from classes. The adventure of slipping, sliding, and hoping that a fall was not in my immediate future is not one that the university should have taken so lightly. Of course the snow-covered ground was a much better alternative, but seeing that the snow had not melted, the hazards were hidden and sticks were a big obstacle for me to avoid entirely.
Yesterday, when I arrived to school, the parking was a breeze only because many students made the conscientious choice to stay home and not make the trek in unfavorable road conditions. Something I noticed immediately was that the parking lots were not cleared from snow and definitely had ice underneath. I heard periodically throughout the school day of people losing control temporarily or just plain old fishtailing in their attempts to get into the unusually vacant parking lots.
Granted, there were crews pouring salt onto the concrete steps near the library, but that was not a common occurrence all over campus. Large patches of snow-covered ice lined the sidewalks between Crisp Hall, Clement and Humanities which gives students another hazard to worry about when trying to get to classes on time. So, if you survived the commute and trying to get into the parking lot, you needed to worry and walk cautiously for fear of falling on the cold, hard, ice-lined sidewalks.
Let me expand further on the notion of these sidewalks. Icewalks is a more fitting term seeing that there was little to no area that was not overwhelmingly iced over during my trek to and from classes. The adventure of slipping, sliding, and hoping that a fall was not in my immediate future is not one that the university should have taken so lightly. Of course the snow-covered ground was a much better alternative, but seeing that the snow had not melted, the hazards were hidden and sticks were a big obstacle for me to avoid entirely.
Be the first to comment on this story