The Tartan Online: "Last Monday through Wednesday, Carnegie Mellon canceled classes for the first time since 2003 — and for the first three-day period in the university’s history.
In a move that might have seemed a bit out of character for Carnegie Mellon, the university’s administration identified the safety risk inherent in a blizzard of the magnitude that swept through Pittsburgh last week, and put classes on hold."
10 comments:
I knew that we were paying an awful lot to come to CMU, but Wow! I never thought about how much it is per day, and to be spending $287 PER DAY! It just leaves me kind of speechless. I realize that the snow days have messed up the schedules of the professors, but I don't know how realistic it is to try and add in those days somewhere else in the semester. I'd be interested to know when they would be proposing to do that. If they decide to tack them onto the end of the semester, it seems to me like that would just make things really difficult for a lot of people. I know that many students have already bought their plane tickets home, and then they would all have to change them. And personally, I'm in a situation where if those three days where tacked onto the end, it might affect my ability to arrive on time for a potential internship that I'm applying for. It just seems like that might be more hassle than it's worth.
Being a student of Roger Rouse, I can say he is indeed staying to his original schedule, which created quite a pile up of reading. While it may work for the moment, I feel this plan is actually going to hurt the students in the long run on the next assignment. I realize that teachers spend a lot of time on syllabuses, but sometimes they need to be adjusted.
I hope they do not add days on to the end of the semester. It will definitely make travel for students difficult if the decision is not made soon. It will also affect many people's summer jobs and internships. I hope the university makes a good decision about what to do and that no more snow days plague there plan
While I throughly enjoyed having a few days off, I still feel as if I lost a week. The four-ish days off were almost the fall break we never had, except you couldn't go anywhere. The uncertainty of classes or no-classes each day turned the days off into a waste. Additionally, I had no projects that I could get ahead on because of this additional time, and instead I achieved a dormfever of sorts. While it is unfortunate that some professors must cancel a project here or there, I am glad that, at least in my classes, we are going to continue putting the time and effort to understand a topic instead of rushing to meet those original deadlines.
As someone who was dumb/bored enough to do the math to figure out how much a snow day cost, I am really hoping that either that money is discounted from next year's tuition, or that I get some of it back. I do not know how the system works surrounding who gets paid when their is not school, but the idea of loosing roughly $200 shy of a thousand for three unscheduled days off really gets to me since no one seems to be handling the lost days well, and I can only begin to wonder how the semester will suffer as a result.
I agree with Tiffany that I don't think adding the days at the end of the semester would work well. There are several international students on my floor who bought their return tickets quite a while ago, and forcing them to buy new tickets seems to add insult to injury. (Paying for the days we lost as well as a few thousand more for new plane tickets is absurd!) I do wish there were some way to make up the time we lost, but not that way. The first snow day was nice, but after that, it just felt like we were wasting time. We couldn't leave, and we didn't have much work to get done.
The snow vacation was a nice break from everything that had been going on, but it did become a huge pain. Yeah, we lost several days of classes, causing professors to reschedule material we were supposed to learn, and figure out how we were supposed to attack assignments that were due during that period. I realize that we did lose a significant amount of our tuition in those days, but they were unexpected, I'm sure those dollars have probably already been used somewhere. The snow didn't just cause huge issues for the school and for SOD productions, but it was just a general pain in the ass. It was impossible to get anywhere because busses weren't running and the roads hadn't been plowed. You could walk places, but because of the amount of snow it would take two to four times as long. I've never liked snow, and this little snow fall helped me realize I want to go somewhere warm soon.
I agree with Charlie, I hope that in some way we are able to make up for the loss of money during the snow days. For one of my electives, the professor canceled the first exam which puts more pressure on the remaining two midterms. Although there were some benefits to having extra time, it has already affected the semester a lot and it'll continue to affect it.
While the snow days were a nice break from school, they have created a fair bit of havoc in it's wake. While the decision to add days at the end of the year is still coming, it may be a little late. In most of my classes, teachers have just stuck or already revised their syllabi to account for the missed days, and while that incurred some extra work for us, most of it's over and done with. As Ariel noted, going day by day with the snow days, not knowing in advance if there was going to be another, kind of caused a bit of havoc with trying to do work because you'd go have a fun day, then get home to find out you have another snow day made you not want to do work and go hang out more, so that was a little crazy. So, while their were nice, those snow days did just cause a bit of craziness with the cancellation of school
While these days off really caused problems for nearly every area of life in Pittsburgh, individual organizations cannot be blamed. Everything boils down the city’s unpreparedness to deal with the snow. While I understand that Pittsburgh is not used to this much snow, but the fact that the city had to basically be shut down for three days is ridiculous. The fact that even four of five days after a snowfall, streets were still impassible to most cars is not ok.
While it is unfair and while much time and money was lost, it is just something we have to deal with. Schedules will need to be revamped; money will need to be redistributed. However, while the calculations reveal an obscene amount of money was lost per day, whom can we go to for this money? It is not the universities’ fault that the city “recommended” they shut down. I just think we must re-adjust and move on.
It was kind of nice to have a few unexpected days off, but I got a little cabin fever by the end of it all. I was glad to leave my apartment again on Thursday. I don't think it makes any sense to tack three days onto the end of the semester; students make plans for the summer based on being able to rely on when the last day of class is, and while losing the days is a pain, it's not something that can't possibly be worked around.
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