Snow Day in Syracuse!?

A couple of weeks before winter break, I woke up (sort of) for my 8 AM math class to a text message. My cell phone screen told me exactly what I wanted to read: school was canceled for the day. Thrilled, I rolled over to go back to sleep - and then jolted awake a couple of minutes later. The text was from my local radio station at home, telling me that had I still been in high school, I would have had the day off. Since I was in Syracuse, I had to jump out of bed and run down the slushy Mount stairs to start my full day of classes.

People applying to SU from all over the country get a uniform reaction to their post-high school plans: "You're applying to Syracuse? You know it's really cold and snows all the time there, right!?" During campus tours senior year, the tour guides always said to kiss snow days goodbye, as the roads are salted and snowplows are gassed here from October to April. I always shrugged, thinking that snow days were a small price to pay for a glamorous life at SU.

Not so much. After winter break I would turn my pajamas inside out and backwards at 3 AM, praying to the snow gods that the falling flakes would accumulate and classes would be canceled. My efforts proved fruitless, as the snow rarely accumulated, classes were never canceled, and I sometimes forgot to correct my pajamas before going to the dining hall. I removed myself from my home radio station's weather alert list and debated whether to switch my major from journalism to education to increase my chances of seeing another snow day before I die.

Then, on Thursday, I got another text message from a number I didn't recognize. I flipped opened my phone and my jaw dropped: SU classes were canceled after 2 PM due to inclement weather. Technically this was not a real snow day - more like a snow afternoon - and I only had one class after 2 PM, compared to the previous day when I had three. But I didn't care. I walked back to Flint grinning, and as I walked I noticed that almost everyone looked a lot happier than they had that morning.

Because, no matter how old you are, there's nothing like a snow day.