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Campus is closed, so college students are rebuilding their schools in Minecraft:
The day before University of Pennsylvania students were told that their college commencement would be held online, junior Andrew Guo thought of an alternative to holding the address over Zoom. Students could have a "Hey Day" and graduation inside Minecraft, just as a Japanese elementary school had organized days earlier.
Quickly, "Penncraft" students began to recreate dormitories, food trucks, and local sculptures in-game. Makarios Chung, an early builder, measured buildings' dimensions and streets positions constantly to ensure their scale was as accurate as possible. The first day of building, students took an hour to decide the placement of one street. Their main goal was to have a completed campus, specifically Locust Street, for graduating seniors to walk down in-game now that COVID-19 ensured they wouldn't return to campus and complete this UPenn tradition.
"I'm the first in my family to graduate from college so it wasn't just my commencement, it was for the rest of my family too," senior Nyazia Sajdah-Bey says. She left campus suddenly, and is now helping rebuild it in Minecraft, days after departure. "I didn't have the chance to properly mourn or, finish out my senior bucket list, say goodbye to my friends and teachers," she says. "I'm still trying to process that loss. So it's really sweet working on the campus. It's making the process of leaving feel less sudden and more gradual." Guo, Chung, and Sajdah-Bey are a few of the hundreds of college students on similar paths of departing and virtually rebuilding.
Students from Boston University to UCLA, from South Louisiana Community College to Northwestern University, have recently created or resurrected Minecraft servers and shared their creations on Discord chats, in Facebook meme groups, and on Reddit threads. The boom of college Minecraft servers has begun. These servers have the express purpose of bringing students together and building, oftentimes focused on recreating their college campuses. Searches for Minecraft server hosting have peaked to unprecedented levels in the last few weeks, and thousands of students are discussing college servers, most notably on the Facebook group "Zoom Memes for Self Quaranteens." Smaller groups and clubs, like Bowdoin College's men's ultimate frisbee team or University of La Verne's debate team, have found ways to bond in survival mode servers after their practices and championships were canceled. Zoom isn't nearly enough, and it doesn't carry the ten years of memories that Gen Z has for Minecraft.
[...] Even without formal organization, students have come together in college servers in curious ways. In the Oberlin College server I created, I returned one day to find an impromptu food cooperative, a throwback to the famous and culturally significant Oberlin Student Cooperative Association that feeds a fourth of the student body with meals cooked by their peers. This Minecraft version mostly consisted of a chest filled with inedible seeds and raw chicken. On the University of Minnesota server, two students played spikeball on the campus green, tossing a sunflower to each other. In the University of Texas server, students held an in-game birthday party at the top of the famous UT Tower where they set off fireworks and ate cake.
Come May there will be in-game graduations. Inspired by the aforementioned Japanese elementary school, Boston University seniors Rudy Raveendran and Warren Partridge created "Quaranteen University." This is a new server specifically made to host a Class of 2020 graduation for students from hundreds of different universities. 706 students from 278 institutions have signed up in the last week, and one mom has already emailed Raveendran asking how she can get an in-game seat to this massive ceremony on May 22nd.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by martyb on Monday April 06 2020, @02:41AM (3 children)
I don't fault them one bit. Instead, I admire their resourcefulness and finding a way to cope in a rapidly changing situation!
Why? This story got me thinking back to my own college years and how I felt as graduation day approached. (Note: I suspect some things in other countries are different; I'm only speaking from my experience.)
There was the sense of anticipation that I was so close to graduation. I had almost finished! Four whole, long years of studying my brains out, pulling all-nighters, cramming for exams. So close, I could almost taste it!
Subsiding on macaroni and cheese (back before ramen noodles were a "thing"). Scrimping to make ends meet. All-too-many "Breakfasts of Champions" (aka cold pizza and warm beer.)
Then there was a lot of anxiety, too. Bordering close to fear. Will I really *really* pass my final exams and graduate? Will I be able to get a job to pay back those loans? Will I be good enough? Will I get started only to find out I was not good enough and get fired? How will I be able to afford living in the "real world" with rent, car payments, insurance, never mind food and supplies?
Though it was not the case for me, personally, I had classmates for whom graduation was followed by professional exams. Fail to pass those and that degree was... not so useful. I could see and feel their tension and anxiety building in them, and in all the rest of us as we faced our life's prospects square on.
Depending on which one I was thinking of at that moment, my feelings were an emotional square wave rapidly oscillating from one extreme to another.
Today's graduating seniors have all that, and more. Wage stagnation means today's pay has not kept up with inflation. The laws in the US have been changed so that student debt persists even after filing for bankruptcy. They are in the midst of a world-wide pandemic. Though they may be comparatively safe, age-wise, all things are relative and so they are not immune, either. Facing the prospect of one's own death is not easy.
So, to find a constructive (heh!) way to deal with the reality of their situation? I give them kudos for their creativity and resourcefulness. For finding some way to wrest even a semblance of control from the huge unknowns they are facing. For persevering and not giving up. "Safe harbors do not good sailors make." Though they may find themselves in the midst of a tempest, my hope is they will come out stronger and more resourceful for the experience.
So, I have no reservations in wishing them well on whatever endeavors they may attempt as their life proceeds.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by FatPhil on Monday April 06 2020, @04:57AM (2 children)
I've got my result, why should I play dress up and be bonked on the head with a parchment scroll by a twat blabbering in Latin? Or whatever they do at these ceremonies. I never even collected a certificate. Fortunately it was never needed to get a job.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Monday April 06 2020, @04:18PM (1 child)
I never attended my PhD graduation ceremony. I was living and working on another continent by then, and had enough leftover debts that I wasn't going to pay for that kind of unnecessary travel. Bu diploma certificate arrived in the mail, together with my academic hood, which was a topologically strange piece of cloth I've never figured out how to wear.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @02:08PM
"Topologically strange"? How? My doctoral hood is topologically equivalent to a coffee mug, as well as a doughnut. Unfortunately, I've never been able to figure out how to use it well in either of those capacities, which would make it much more useful.