Since the start of the new school year arrived, there has been talk about what colleges will be doing to take precautions for COVID-19. Some colleges have taken the approach to make their students quarantine in fear of more cases or to limit how many in-person classes students have. 

Schools like Notre Dame have had a rise in cases since the start of school and chose to quarantine the students.

 “We had to move classes online because there was a huge outbreak of cases traced back to off-campus parties. I think cases were up to 150 in a day,” said sophomore Kayla Daruty. 

Other schools like Marquette University have not chosen to quarantine students yet but instead are doing daily wellness checks for each student. 

“Each day before people go on to campus they have to do a wellness check where we take our temperature and report any symptoms we have. If you pass the wellness check, you are free to enter buildings throughout campus,” said senior Emily Smith. 

Schools like Notre Dame are now taking it upon themselves to make sure to test more students since the outbreak of cases. 

“They only tested people with symptoms or people who were in contact with people who tested positive, but a couple of weeks ago they also implemented surveillance testing so they randomly select students to come to get tested,” Daruty said. 

 Students who test positive are immediately quarantined and need food during their time away.  Handing out food to students in quarantine has not been a problem for Notre Dame students like it has been for other schools. 

“When students are sent to quarantine, the university brings them food. My friends who had to quarantine said they actually brought her too much food while she was there,” Daruty said.

In case of a potential outbreak, Marquette University has made sure classes will be able to move online.

“There have been a few mentions of online school in some of my classes. Most of my classes are online components so the transition to fully online would not be difficult,”Smith said. 

The thought of having to do online classes is really hard for some students, since it’s taking away the chance to fully learn in their classes. 

“I think for some of my courses I don’t mind it, but for classes in my major, it’s really frustrating. I feel like it’s harder to understand what we’re studying when part of the course is online,” Smith said.