With the school year rapidly approaching, websites and blogs alike are spewing content filled with tips, encouragement, reality checks and support for incoming freshman and upperclassman alike. While there is no reason to not be excited to return to your second home and be reunited with your friends, there are also reasons coming back sucks. You have to deal with nuisances again. That being said, here are five reasons Ball State students are not excited to come back to Muncie:
1. Potholes
If you're familiarized with Muncie to any degree, you're keenly aware of how annoying these are. Over the course of three months, you've readjusted to a relatively smooth drive. Coming back to the bumpy roads are jarring and quite frankly a rude awakening. You'll miss your roads back at home.
2. The Five Way Stop
If you approach this mid-afternoon or any other busy time, you've experienced the dread and anxiety this can cause. Some sites even have TWO lanes on their sign. This can be up more than five cars at a time, and it's always overwhelming to figure out whose turn it is. When you decide to be brave and veer out, look in all four directions at once because you don't know who else's turn it is too.
3. The Construction
To be fair, 2016-2017 was not the worst year for construction. The only major site was on the north end of campus, away from heavy student traffic. But as students enter and return this year, we have to deal with new road construction, Emens, a major car and foot site in front of Woodworth, the new dorm, Lafollette's destruction, a new health building and any unstarted projects, it's easy for students to be wary and long for the day a more easily navigatable campus.
4. W. McGalliard Road
It is Muncie's most-heavily traveled on road. Connecting you to the highway or bypass, it's a majority of the student's entrance to the university itself. Naturally, businesses capitalized on this and made it the hub for the mall, every restaurant known to man and shops. It doesn't matter what time of the day you seem to travel, you will be waiting in some form of traffic. Lights are abundant, the lack of common sense in drivers will enrage and overwhelm you, and trying to turn left out of any business is a personal hell. If you can, it's best just to avoid this road at all costs.
5. Parking Services
Is it a formal college post if we don't have the obligatory rant about parking services? But this is at the top of many students list of things they don't miss. Always watching, always lurking, waiting for you to make a mistake, Parking service is notorious for ticketing innocent students, parents and guests alike. The ticket isn't cheap and can be a major blow for any student in desperate need of money. Parking Services is the evil within the campus.
Even though Ball State is the #1 school in the nation (per me), and I would never even think about choosing another school, it's important to keep a level head and remember that everything is not perfect. While this list could go on (and on) about various things students didn't miss, some things just vary. Some people may actually like having a crippling fear the five way stop, who knows!
