Tag: ruweather

You don’t really know what weather is until you’ve been a student at Rutgers.

My first day of class and I’m sitting in a lecture hall among 400 other students. It’s September and it must be a solid 90 something degrees outside, adding a few degrees when accounting for humidity. It’s a chemistry lecture so you can imagine we’re all already pretty agitated. Rutgers University, a university as big as 5 campuses and home to roughly 50,000 undergraduate students, DOESN’T HAVE ANY AIR CONDITIONING ON in this huge lecture hall. The day was not pretty. My friend and I were sweating our asses through our jeans. But perhaps that simple description doesn’t justify the extreme ness of the heat. I casually look behind me to see how many students are coming in still and I see a girl at the edge of row JUST STRIP HER SHIRT. My girl was just chilling there in her hot pink bra in the middle of lecture. You would really think that a college that we pay thousands in tuition for would take simple precautions of turning on the AC to ensure no one dies of a heat stroke but nah. #RUScrew.

Now it’s the same day but I’m in a different lecture hall, one that holds roughly 500-600 students. This room has the air condition CRANKED UP HIGH. It was like Antarctica in there. I had to get up and pee twice and if it wasn’t so hard to navigate through the row seating, I would’ve went the third time. I really couldn’t win. I thought if I wore a tank top to my classes I’d survive the melting pot of students that we were becoming, but no. That’s when I learned that the key to RU during summer was layering.

While thoughts of sweating like a pig were horrifying, believe it or not, Rutgers ALMOST made me miss those days. I came back from winter break and for some odd reason, my dorm room was the same temperature inside as it was outside. My guy. It’s 2 degrees outside.Why is there no heat in my dorm room?? Now, that was easily handled with full sleeve sweaters and double layering on my blankets but the worst part came in the morning. I hopped in the shower to get ready for class and the water was SO COLD that that shit was PIERCING INTO MY SKIN. I was numb as hell. I had shampoo in my hair and I’m dancing around in the shower trying to keep my blood flow going as I wash out all the suds. This went on for A WEEK. I don’t know why these issues weren’t handled quicker. There were people who didn’t have their heat turned on till much later than a week. My friends would walk out and head to class and their hair would be FROZEN.

The extreme cold was a battle on its own. When the snow was added in, it literally became chaos. Leave it to Rutgers to not cancel any classes while the rest of the surrounding public universities are shutting down. No, we had everything still up and running, no matter how delayed. I got on a shuttle bus to head to class the day that it was snowing and I was in there for AN HOUR. The ride is supposed to be an exact 8 minutes. That shit was moving at the literal pace of a turtle. Like, if it really was that hard to drive then the University should’ve been shut down. My class had ended by the time I got to Busch campus. #RUScrew

Some lessons really required the experience to learn all that I did. With the huge university that we are, small problems, which are big to a single individual, go unnoticed. We just have to maneuver around them. Be prepared for all weather types and take into account any delays while traveling and maybe, just maybe, you won’t be RUScrewed.