While it’s always nice waking up to a university-wide email declaring the cancellation of classes due to weather (especially Friday morning after a fun Thursday night out), having a snow day for many college students can be seen as a positive or a negative. Last Friday, Vanderbilt students and faculty, along with the citizens of Nashville, were graced with seven lovely inches of snow, which is more than the city has seen in a while, thanks to 2016’s winter storm Jonas.
Side note: I'm wondering which Jonas inspired this storm's name. It's probably not Kevin, but please let me know.
The best part about having a snow day, in my opinion, is the ultimate excuse to avoid all physical activity and basically any movement in general. With snow comes very low temperatures that prevent many people, with exception of the adventurous ones and those typically from the Northeast and Midwest, from leaving the comfort of their homes. Snow days are crucial times to catch up on TV shows you haven’t had time to watch and also binge on your favorite and new movies. Aside from Netflix and literally chilling, I spent much of my snow day in bed catching up on sleep I missed from the stressful college week that had passed. Everyone should, but only a few people actually do, use the snow day to catch up and or get ahead on homework assignments to save time later on. Having no class and a long weekend ahead also made it completely acceptable and excusable to attend a party on a Friday afternoon after being utterly and completely unproductive all morning. You now have two full days to do your homework, as your typical Saturday is now essentially Friday.
Although it’s great to have this extra down time, many college professors do not view snow days the same as the students. Professors don’t use the snow day as an excuse to not do an assignment; rather, they forget about the lost day and expect the students to cover material on their own that would’ve been covered in class. This actually burdens students more in the future, as they now inevitably have more work to do for the next class period.
The city of Nashville is a great place; it’s fun, hip, exciting, and interesting. The one flaw I now find in Nashville, having been a student living here for two years, is their inability to handle snow and bad weather. I will give the south a break, as no one has ever expected conditions such as these. Most restaurants and campus dining locations decided to close due to weather almost immediately. Options were limited and, honestly, food was scarce. Many of my friends and I spent Friday morning stocking up at our dorms’ Munchie Mart in case they ran out of food, and no one was joking around. Uber surges were high and salt for the roads was nowhere to be found. The snow day also brought some nostalgia with it. Memories of being a young kid who only cared about sledding and drinking hot chocolate, with no worries about homework, internship applications, or being social on a day with no school.
To me, born and raised in a northern suburb of Chicago, Illinois, this was slightly comical. My friends from Texas were scared to go outside, and many people I know saw snow for the first time. Although there are negatives to having a snow day, I think the pros definitely outweigh the cons. There are few things in life that could have excited me more, aside from an egg sandwich with avocado, on a Friday morning than finding out my 8:45 a.m. quiz all the way across campus was cancelled. I guess I will have to forgive Nashville for its slight incompetency in regards to dealing with snow.
