While many students dreaded the first significant snowfall of the season on the Oswego State campus, some were excited to start the winter season.

On Thursday, a rainy morning at Oswego State turned to frozen precipitation and by afternoon, large snowflakes drifted onto the campus.

Student reactions were as mixed as the freezing precipitation, though most focused on the relatively cold temperatures and snow that seemingly marked the end of warm weather for the year.

While most students seemed prepared with winter coats and boots, some students wore only light jackets or wrapped themselves in blankets to brave the cold temperatures and gusting wind as they made their way across campus.

“This is the only coat I own, and I’m already cold,” Adrianna Diodato, an Oswego State freshman said outside Marano Campus Center. “Now it’s snowing, and I wasn’t prepared for this because it doesn’t snow where I live.”

Diodato was with two other freshmen, Hallie Rapisarda and Jess Silver, as they walked from Marano Campus Center to “someplace warm.”

“I just had my mom send my jacket up. It’s getting too cold, I need it already, thank God,” Rapisarda said.

The three students are from Long Island and this is their first winter in Oswego.

“This is just really early and it never snows at home,” Silver said. “I feel like [the snow] has gotten considerably harder since we’ve gotten outside.”

The snow was cause for excitement, however, for students in the meteorology program at the Shineman Center.

Kayla Mazurkiewicz, a senior meteorology student at Oswego State, said she was in a class for her program when she first noticed the snowfall.

“Right when we saw it, we were all like ‘it’s snowing right now’ and we all took a minute and looked,” Mazurkiewicz said. “Everyone was very excited to see, I wanted to go on the roof but I couldn’t find anyone to take me up there.”

According to Kaitlyn Lardeo and Joespeh Houck, two juniors in the meteorology program, Oswego’s famously snowy winters are a major draw for students looking to study meteorology. 

“We’re watching this from the very beginning, and then the other students walking around are just begging for [snow] not to happen,” Lardeo said. 

The coming winter is being closely watched by students in the program, as they monitor it for part of their course work. Meteorology students even have classroom games and assignments surrounding winter weather systems and forecasting when they will hit Oswego.

“We kind of bet when we’ll get lake-effect snow,” Houck said. “We’ve been watching the GFS, it’s a global numerical [weather] model, watching the cold spells come through and it’s starting to happen.”

After a few winters at Oswego State, the three meteorology students said they have seen a good deal of surprising things when the weather turns cold, from fierce wintry weather, the high winds and deep snow and also some of the unpreparedness of Oswego students. Mazurkiewicz saw one student wearing flip-flops in 34 degree Fahrenheit weather, with 11 mile-per-hour winds at 1 p.m. on Thursday, according to the student’s data.

“I was telling all my housemates, I was just like ‘get ready, it’s coming and you’re not going to be ready for it,’” Houck said. “I think people were really caught off guard too, because we kind of had an abnormally warm fall, for a while it was just warm, and all of a sudden the pattern changed and now it’s snowing and I don’t think people were ready for that.”

Lake Ontario heavily contributes to Oswego’s wintry weather. The lake takes longer to cool in winter than the surrounding land, so as cold air moves across the relatively warm lake early in the winter, it creates an atmospheric setting that can lead to a unique type of snow. This lake-effect snow causes heavy snowfall in areas around the lakeshore, from Buffalo and Rochester to Syracuse and Watertown.

“We have something here that other programs don’t have, we have the lake-enhanced snow, lake effect snow,” Mazurkiewicz said. “It gets heavy at times and it’s a good thing to be a student here and studying that because it gives us advantages over students studying elsewhere. As a freshman I was prepared for it, I was excited for it, I wanted it to happen. This is what I came here for, this is something no one else has.”