Walking up the steps outside Virginia Tech’s Myers-Lawson School of Construction, senior Sydney Buck is the only student in sight at the Blacksburg, Va., university. It’s the first visit in months for the construction engineering and management major to the 35,000-student campus, which now looks more like Christmas break than the first week of fall semester. “I think of all the times I’ve walked onto campus—the steps are always so crowded and the tables full,” she recalls. “It’s shocking.”
For the first two weeks, Buck's only in-person class is being held online as a “control measure” to shield classmates from possible virus infection. While Virginia Tech will allow a hybrid of online and in-person instruction this semester, social distancing, masks and half-empty classrooms are the norm.