UCF grinds to a halt as classes move online
Perched in a hammock with his legs dangling over the side, Joseph Muñoz looked over the near-empty Memorial Mall, an area of UCF’s campus that’s typically buzzing with students chattering on cellphones or kicking soccer balls across the lawn on most weekday afternoons.
Not so on Monday, when just a few students trickled across the quad. An occasional electric scooter hummed past. A single student sat outside a nearby coffee shop, highlighting lines in a textbook.
The day University of Central Florida students were due to return from spring “sort of feels like a Sunday evening,” Muñoz said.
By that, he meant, many services were running — the shuttles, some restaurants, the library. But the campus was unusually still for a Monday afternoon. Other popular areas, including the student union building, were closed.
Like other Florida’s other public universities, UCF said last week it will switch to online-only classes for at least two weeks because of worries about coronavirus. Students were urged not to come back to campus after spring break.
But for some students, like Muñoz, going home doesn’t seem like a good plan. Muñoz’s parents live in Puerto Rico, which instituted a curfew through the end of the month. His parents didn’t want him to come home for spring break so he stayed at his apartment at Knights Circle, an apartment complex across the street from campus. There, most students seem like they’re still in spring break mode, filling the pool and basketball courts during the day.
Many classes haven’t resumed yet, said Isaac Tuckey and Abby Yurkovich, who relaxed in a nearby hammock. They had returned to campus mostly to gather their things so they could go home for a couple of weeks.
“It’s kinda nice, but also, you miss everybody,” said Yurkovich, an 18-year-old freshman from Jensen Beach, as she looked at the mostly empty mall.
While canceling in-person classes at UCF seemed like a reasonable step to Muñoz, he said some classes are tough to replicate online.
“It minimizes the risk of propagating the virus, but I am 100 percent sure the university was not ready to have online classes,” said Muñoz, a 22-year-old who is planning to graduate next year.
Outside Addition Arena, Chris Dupont of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, sat with his family in loungestyle chairs. They had planned to go to Disney World this week, but their plans changed when the parks closed.
So, they embarked on a selfguided university tour. Dupont’s daughter, Gaby, is a high school junior who wants to attend college in Florida and work at Disney.