What do y’all think the likelihood of returning to campus is the fall looks like?
He heard in 1 day from Residential College at West AJ, so I was hoping Galipatia would be equally as quick. Fingers crossed. I was just hoping others had heard quicker to give him more than a couple hours to decide. LOL.
It will be interesting to see what they can put into place over the summer that might help open things up in the fall. I think there will be pressure on many universities to be open in the Fall for financial reasons, so I put the odds at better than 50/50 they’ll be open in the Fall with some sort of modified precautions in place. We’ll see.
My son was accepted to Galileo. He sent in the application in mid March and got the acceptance email about 3 weeks later. He hadn’t yet accepted at the time, but I don’t think that affects the approval timeframe.
Tech President Sands has said he won’t make a decision until June. I think at that time trends will be that they proceed with opening. But only a guess by anyone at this point what the political atmosphere on Covid19 will be in a month.
@Colin02 I predict a ‘soft opening’ in the fall. Students will be on campus, but with a lot of altered procedures (dining halls, recreation, library etc. will have various restrictions). I also think a lot of classes will be online anyway, to avoid packing students into classrooms. The classes that still happen in person will be those that really need to be done in person (those with labs, etc.), and smaller classes where everyone can spread out. We also might see alterations to the academic calendar, with classes starting earlier/later than normal. This is all just my speculation, based on the chatter I’m hearing from VT and other nearby universities.
Personally, I’m not sure it’s a helpful contribution to these forums to post speculative COVID replies to questions from teenagers. Too frequently they may take adult feedback as fact. Maybe it’s best left to reference a link from official university communications? Not a criticism… but does CC really need a second category of “chance me”?
I think students and prospective students in this forum can understand words like ‘predict’ and ‘speculation’. Opinions are shared in CC all of the time, especially when people outright ask for opinions.
Btw, Radford University (20 minutes away from VT and also public) just this morning announced to faculty and staff that they plan to be open for the fall, with the requisite contingency planning. Universities seem to be trying to get out in front of this.
Has anybody heard back about Galipatia from the April applications? Was supposed to hear by today, and I’m getting worried that we haven’t heard anything.
FYI, Virginia Tech planning in-person fall classes ‘with caveats’
@HokieCrazy , Would not getting into Galileo be a deal breaker? I know you’ve said your son has other options and is on waitlists elsewhere. Many engineering kids are not in Honors or Galileo and are able to do very well. Many of them actually prefer to be with a variety of kids ,in engineering as well as other majors, and prefer regular dorms. Any regular dorm would probably have other engineering majors to connect with. You know your son best, obviously, and how important Galileo is to him and being with engineering students. Good luck with hearing from Galileo !
The website indicated that he’d hear, today, and hasn’t. Apparently, he’ll hear next week. My son was very excited about Galileo, as well as Clemson’s RISE. I don’t actually know how important it is to him, though, so I guess we’ll see.
Anybody have a post-renovated floor plan of West AJ? And do you know how they do the co-ed part (is it by floor or do they split the floors half/half)? I’m surprised that the room selection app doesn’t have a floor plan in it…just a list of room numbers seems odd.
@HokieCrazy I don’t think the reno would have had much more of an impact than some of the rooms having been taken into alternate use. The github floor plan shows room numbers, so if you have a list in the app you can compare to see if any rooms no longer exist. It appears that VT removed floorplans of their buildings after the 2007 tragedy.
I see a couple of mentions about West AJ having Suite-style rooms, though, so I was thinking the room layouts changed. I will definitely have the floor plans up when I’m able to see them in the app. Sort of surprised that the app isn’t a little more sophisticated when it comes to room selection. After all, if any of you have done football ticket seat selection…oh, my!
I was hoping for maybe a reddit link that had something more recent, but I couldn’t find anything.
VT housing shows it West AJ and East AJ as both being traditional style, hall bath.
Not sure where I saw that it was a mix of both…oh, well. Not a big deal.
There’s at least 1 res hall that has a mix, but I can’t remember which one. Traditional style is better for making new friends anyway. Some of the halls have a fairly pronounced “split” between sides, so males are all on one side and females all on the other. Others do it by floor. Suffice to say… some of those boundaries get fairly gray after a couple weeks. 
Payne has hall style on 4th floor but suites in the lower 3 floors.
@HokieCrazy are you in the Virginia Tech Parents facebook group? They have files with info about each dorm and you can search the group for related posts.
I assume your son is going to VT if you are picking dorm rooms!