By Pranay Malempati | Sports Reporter
Last week, Baylor announced an extended spring break and two weeks of online classes. Because of that announcement, and because of what has been taking place in universities around the country, Monday’s news seemed inevitable.
President Livingstone’s announcement that Baylor is moving online for the remainder of the semester certainly hit hard for a lot of students. But it especially hit hard for seniors who are graduating in May. I know this because, well, I am one of those seniors.
My heart sank when I found out that I would never again sit in class as a Baylor student, that I wouldn’t be able to celebrate Dia as a senior, that I likely wouldn’t be able to say a final goodbye to many of the friends and professors I have met at Baylor.
And to make matters worse, the postponement of graduation from May to August means that we won’t have a graduation week. It’s even possible that some of us seniors won’t be able to walk the stage. A lot of us will be either working a job or getting ready for graduate/professional school, and may not be able to come back in August.
Yet even with all the unfortunate side effects of closing Baylor’s campus and moving classes online, it was the right decision to make. The novel coronavirus has shaken the world in a way nothing has in generations. We still don’t have a vaccine or a treatment for the disease.
And it’s not just Baylor. Pretty much every university across America, along with most schools, have closed down and moved online. Sports leagues across the world, including the NBA and the NCAA, have been cancelled or postponed. Many cities, including Waco, have ordered restaurants, bars, gyms and movie theaters to close down.
If Baylor students are going to lose the rest of this semester and if we seniors are going to lose our last two months of college, then let’s do our best to make sure it’s worth it. We need to do what we can to help slow the spread of this virus and try to help keep the number of infected people as low as possible. If we follow the CDC’s guidelines, the faster we will be able to get society back to normal.
Even though we suddenly lost two months of our college experience, the decision to move classes online was the best decision to make. Hopefully, the coronavirus will be contained by August, so that seniors will have the option to walk the stage and Baylor students can continue with their normal college lives next semester. Let’s do our part to make that happen.
