The weather in southern New Jersey is such a tease, especially in the colder months.

The predictions made by the weather app are even more wrong (if you can believe such a thing is possible) when it comes to Rowan weather. In the spring and summer, things aren’t typically too bad. It gets hot here and there but usually, there’s a breeze to cool things down. The problem is that cold breeze never goes away.

The wind makes the nice days bad and the bad days worse. When people in the rest of the state are enjoying 40°F weather, we are enjoying a 40°F day with a 10°F wind. If it’s one of those randomly warm days in New Jersey where we all joke about climate change obviously being a lie, the 60°F weather everywhere else feels more like 30°F here. And the worst of it all is when it’s already cold outside but, for Glassboro, not quite cold enough. I’ve walked to classes in weather below zero with a strong wind and received a pop quiz upon my arrival.

The common joke on the Rowan campus is that we are going to school in a wind tunnel and it couldn’t be truer. You can hear the wind almost anywhere on campus 24/7. The worst is in the bottom floor of my apartment building, where the doors aren’t quite big enough to fulling seal the building and the wind catches them in such a way that it always sounds as though there is strong winds. Walking out those doors is a 50/50 shot of either tolerable winds or contemplating whether the class you are about to walk to is really worth it.

If wind is in the forecast, you might as well strap lead blocks to your shoes because turning any corner could mean you are swept off the ground and into space. Even on the days when you may think there’s no wind – there’s wind.

It’s the same with rain here. Rowan is perpetually in a state of a roughly 80% chance of rain. I don’t care what the weather app is telling you – odds are it will rain at least once that day for anywhere between 5 minutes to an hour. There have been times where I have left my building, saw it was raining, went back to my room to get an umbrella, and by the time I got back outside it was sunny again. Multiple times.

But when it's predicted to rain here, it pours. The science building, where I spend most of my time, has a façade largely made of glass. It’s a beautiful way to look out the building and not even a bad way to watch the rain as it cascades down.

The problem is when you realize you have to walk across campus. Suffice to say that the rain becomes far less pretty. And the thing that blows my mind is the fact that, even after all this rain, the campus still isn’t equipped to drain it properly. Huge, 3-6 inch deep puddles stretch the length of the sidewalk outside or between academic buildings.