By Austin Santiago
“This Wi-Fi is fuckin’ weird,” said junior student Ariana John when asked about the poor connection that students have found to be commonplace on campus. John was one of many that remembered being victim to a random Wi-Fi outage when trying to submit an assignment on Blackboard. Then he received a failing grade.
For many students who are just looking to sit down and use the internet, finding a hotspot for Wi-Fi on campus has become somewhat of a game. Location is everything. The campus is riddled with dead zones from Ingersoll to Roosevelt, the West Quad, and even the first floor of the library. Aside from being unable to access social media and make outside calls, the poor Wi-Fi on campus also continually manages to negatively impact academics at Brooklyn College.
The poor Wi-Fi costs students their academic standing, seriously impacting their overall grades.
“In some classrooms, they have no access to Wi-Fi at all. It’s inconvenient when the professor uses blackboard or powerpoint for class and you can’t access it,” sophomore student Karina Espinal, a told WBCR News.
The poor Wi-Fi on campus was not lost among BC faculty either. In an anonymous interview with WBCR, one lab assistant expanded on the college’s Wi-Fi troubles and said, “the server could definitely be better.”
When asked if all of these different usernames and passwords were overworking the server the lab assistant said, “It’s possible.”
“If you were a student first registered in Brooklyn College before 2015, your Wi-Fi credentials will be different from a person that was registered after. It keeps changing, from 2009 up until this present day there are three to four different Wi-Fi credentials that a person could possibly have,” said the BC employee. The I.T. department did not respond to requests for comment by deadline. At this point, it remains unclear whether Brooklyn College considered, or pursued a complete software update.