CHAMPAIGN — University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign freshman Ipshita Singh has been in town for a week.
Singh grew up in the Chicago suburbs and wants to pursue engineering – either to work in the pharmaceutical industry or maybe to work on semiconductors. She said U of I’s strong engineering program drew her, in addition to the campus.
“The campus is really beautiful. The buildings are nice, because I’ve toured some other campuses and they don’t feel as put together,” Singh added. “It really does feel like a little city in the middle of all these cornfields.”
Classes began Monday for Singh and other U of I students. She was surprised at how quickly she started learning math in one of her classes but also enjoyed her teacher teasing students about their summers.
As Singh navigates difficult classes and learning to share a bathroom with messy boys, she has one big political issue on her mind – automated license plate readers owned by the company, Flock Safety.
“We should feel safe in our homes,” Singh said. “These cameras are an invasion of our privacy because we didn’t consent to this.”
She said she signed a petition opposing Flock that has been circulating among students. She worried about the cameras having facial recognition and the data being misused by hackers or other bad actors.
The City of Champaign says on its website it does not use Flock’s video service and that the license plate readers are only capturing images of plates.
The state of Illinois has investigated out-of-state searches of local Flock databases for abortion and immigration enforcement purposes. That kind of search is against Illinois law.
Teaching workload begins too
For School of Music PhD student Jake Hutchinson, the new semester means a lot more work.
“My email inbox has quintupled. My time has halved,” he said.
Hutchinson teaches a course with fellow PhD student and instructor Mason Cox. Students in the course learn how to play new instruments. Cox said the new semester is fun, though, and Hutchinson agreed, laughing.
“There was great energy from everyone,” Cox said. “I was cracking off more social media references than I probably should have, but it got a lot of laughs.”
Class also began Monday at the University of Illinois in Springfield and Chicago.