Upperclassmen can all remember the excitement of being a freshman. Feelings of independence and maturity are just about to set in when an unexpected pang of homesickness creeps up on you. After a long day you creep back to your dorm room to read e-mails from home and check the comforting messages your loved ones left you on AIM.
Of course, freshmen this year couldn’t be comforted during the first few weeks of school due to the worst nightmare of college campuses and lonely freshmen alike- a computer virus that downed the Internet.
Not that college is so completely alien and frightening to freshmen, but it is nice to fall back on what’s familiar that first week. Internet would have made the transition from home to school easier.
The transition into school would have been a lot easier also. The Internet isn’t just a security blanket for freshman, but our link to each other. Not only is it infinitely easier to communicate with your next-door neighbor via AIM, but infinitely cooler.
This coupled with the added challenge that was presented to the freshman class in having to guess where classes would be held on a campus we’ve never been on before because the schedules were online. Professors understood this, but when they expected us to access online programs and e-mails regularly, that became another problem. Not that we couldn’t go to the library to find all of this information, but there’s only so many trips you can take before the librarians start to greet you by name.
On the upside, all the freshmen (not to mention the upperclassmen) got to know the Barone Campus Center really well. Since conversation over AIM was out, a good substitute was bonding during those seven hours you waited for CNS to get to your computer.
During this age of the Internet we are all pathetically dependent on it, so perhaps it wasn’t such a horrible thing that we freshmen had to rough it during the first few weeks. Instead of cowering in our dorm rooms we had a reason to get out of the room and into the sun, a chance to meet other Internet deprived freshmen, and even a chance to do homework. (That trend will probably not last).
In any case, if your computer is fixed, but your Internet is still down you can always trek to the Jazzman’s Café Internet station to read your e-mails from home while enjoying an Oreo blizzard.
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