By Kristen Levine
“It’s an inconvenience,” Alyssa says, wrinkling her nose slightly as she looks at the mess of Fitchburg State’s quad. “It tacks on an extra 10 minutes to my walk to class every day, and it’s just a major inconvenience. I wish the school would do something about it.”
Several interviews later, the opinions are the same. The ongoing campus construction is seen as an eyesore and impassable obstacle to students just trying to get on with their days.
The construction crews are likely tired of hearing the repetitive complaints. While it seems implausible, some students seem to feel the construction is being deliberately done to annoy and inconvenience them, rather than to improve the school.
Students who are used to the even flow of an unchanging environment have become disoriented and almost reflexively angry at the upset.
“I get that the school has all the federal funding now, but they could’ve organized it better,” Sean says, sitting at a picnic table in the shady walk by the library. “Like, instead of rushing headlong into this whole mess of construction, just doing one thing at a time.”
When asked what he would have liked to see done first, Sean shrugs.
“Maybe the science building, like what they started with? I don’t know, anything aside from the whole cluster(expletive) they turned the project into.”
While the construction does offer difficulty in navigating the expansive campus, it comes at the eventual gain of an updated, modernized school that will attract attention the country over. The school has become a major draw for Fitchburg, and in Mayor Lisa Wong’s ever-uphill battle to improve the city, it will be a champion of progress.
For now, students must deal with the inconveniences and dissatisfaction of a campus in shambles, and await the hoped-for rise to glory at its completion.