As APSU announced campus would be closed Monday, Feb. 16, to Saturday, Feb. 21 due to hazardous conditions, many students relished the break from classes and other activities. But while some spent the weeklong break building snowmen, orchestrating snowball fights and sledding on everything from trashcan lids to inflatable inner tubes, many students enrolled in specialized majors like nursing, pre-med, and pre-dentistry were less than pleased to have missed a week of classes.

Junior nursing student Lauren Forbes said she feels academic pressure returning to campus after such an extended break. As a nursing student, Forbes is required to attend clinicals at local hospitals twice a week for about eight hours a day. “We are assigned a patient and we take their vital signs, give medicine, file paperwork, and we always try to help other nurses out with bathing patients or anything else,” Forbes said. “We have to research all the medicine we will be giving patents the night before clinical.”

Although the missed lectures were recorded and posted online, nursing students must also find the time to make up missed clinical hours. “When I come back, I have a test on Monday, a test on Friday, and a test [the] next Monday, and I’ll only have a week to learn the material,” Forbes said. “So [the break] definitely puts me behind.”

While APSU resumed normal operations Monday, Feb. 23, many students and professors are still left playing catch-up.