By Autumn Parr
When freezing temperatures swept across north Louisiana and turned campus sidewalks into sheets of ice, Louisiana Tech students found themselves with an unexpected gift: an entire week without classes. Tech students had to prepare, bundle up and navigate the snow.
With the weeklong closure, many students adapted by going home, staying inside or venturing out into the snow.
On campus, students like Hannah Baker spent most of their time in the dorms, but she also raised concerns about how the snow affected her school work.
“It was hard to get in contact with teachers,” she said. “I had a test that’s now been pushed back almost a week.”
Still, she felt Tech handled the situation well, keeping roads salted and the cafeteria open.
Another on-campus student, Tyler Pearce, described his experience during the break.
“I just kinda hung out at my dorm for most of the time, watching movies and then spending time with my girlfriend,” Pearce said.
He also expressed concerns about schoolwork.
“It definitely pushed things back a bit, like the next couple of weeks are gonna be more loaded than what they normally would have been,” he said.
Other students handled the snow by traveling home. Audrey Usher, an architecture major, chose to leave campus.
“I went home and I grabbed my desktop from Hale Hall so I could continue to work on my midterm while I was at home,” she said.
When asked how she felt about the snow break, Usher said, “I feel like it was probably good that they continued to extend it, but being on the quarter system, it really does affect future weeks, especially in architecture. There’s less time to work on projects.”
For off-campus students like Sophia Majors and Bella Roberie, who are roommates at an apartment complex near campus, the break presented unexpected challenges.
“Before the snowstorm, we tried to stock up on food, specifically non-perishables,” Roberie said, but the break lasted longer than they expected.
“We ended up running out of food later,” she said. “We had to walk all the way to the small Walmart (on California Avenue), and it was about an hour walk. When we got there, we realized it was closed and had to walk to another store just to get more food.”
During their trip, the two described the conditions as nerve-racking. “At one point, we had to walk on the road because it was so difficult to walk in the snow, but a lot of times we had to quickly move out of the way because cars were speeding,” Majors said.
Majors describe the experience as “a journey we can tell our kids.”
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