Dean Runner has announced that AS&E will cancel all classes—graduate and undergraduate—on Tuesday, November 3, with the goal of providing a little relief to our community, and our student population in particular. We’ve heard from students that they are feeling stressed and anxious in more extreme ways than ever before, and we hope this “mental health day” will be helpful.

Information about leaving and checking out of campus housing after in-person instruction ends on November 24—and about the Winter Stay period—is now available.

This year, Winter Stay will be broken into two periods—Short Term stay (November 25-December 19, 2020) for students who would benefit from remaining on-campus for the remainder of the fall semester and Long Term stay (November 25-January 22, 2021) for students who require living accommodations until the beginning of the spring semester. To learn about your options and how to register visit Rochester.edu/reslife/general/winter-break.html and be on the lookout for the online survey to register starting early this week.

The FBI recently sent a nationwide warning that cyber ransomware attacks on hospital systems are imminent. The Medical Center has urgently communicated to its faculty, staff, and students the need for them to change their University passwords as soon as possible. Because this cybersecurity threat has the potential to severely affect the entire University system, all faculty, staff, and students University-wide are being asked to do the same. In doing this, everyone can help protect the University’s information system from an attack that could result in employee, student, and patient records being compromised and unretrievable.

For most everyone, this means changing two passwords—your NetID and your Active Directory ID. How to change both of these passwords is outlined here. Accessing this page requires a University network or VPN connection.

If you’ve updated both passwords in the last two weeks (since October 15) you may disregard this request. You will also need to remember to update the passwords you are using to sign into any applications that use these credentials on smartphones, tablets, and other computers.

We understand that changing passwords can be disruptive, especially right now, and we appreciate your attention to this.

For assistance, contact the University IT Help Desk at (585) 275-2000 or univithelp@rochester.edu.

Daylight Savings Time ended at 2 a.m. today. This means that in the eastern time zone clocks have shifted back one hour. Please note that courses and other remote meetings will shift in accordance with the time change.