College students started online classes on Wednesday March 18, the day that Governor Tony Evers ordered all public and private schools in Wisconsin to be closed. Some colleges have closed before the deadline to give students time to get their stuff out of the dorms. 

Jaylynn Glaus is a Freshman at the University of Minnesota Duluth who is majoring in marketing and graphic design and minoring in photography. She has been living in the dorms at UMD since the beginning of the year. It took her about a week to move out of her dorm. She is really sad that her freshman year is ending and misses all of her roommates. 

“It was devastating finding out my freshman year was ending,” Glaus said.

Some of the many reasons that she is sad about her freshman year of college ending is she doesn’t get to hang out with her friends and experience college life at its fullest. 

Most of her classes were already online but they would have in person lectures for them to be able to ask questions and get help if needed. Her professors now use a website called Zoom, where the students and professors can log in and facetime to be able to  do their lectures. 

“The biggest responsibility was having to be held accountable to log into your lectures on time,” Glaus said.

It is a bigger responsibility now that she has online classes because she is held accountable to be there. There was only one time that she was late but, she made sure to email the teacher before showing up late. 

After the Safer At Home order, Jaylynn was laid off from being a server at Shamrock and Jimmy’s, so she decided to pick up a new job at Aldi. At her new job she gets paid to keep the carts wiped down all the time to reduce covid from spreading.

“The one nice thing about it is that I now have more time to do things in my free time because I am not in school for 2-5 hours a day,” Glaus said.

Some of the advantages of having online classes is that students can do their classwork at any point in time rather than sitting in classes all day. Since she is still employed she can do her homework after work in the evening. Some of her classes have recorded lectures so she can watch them whenever. 

Glaus misses many things from college including how she doesn’t get to hang out with her friends, or how she cant get the college experience like she would living in the dorms.