RALEIGH – The biggest heartache of fall semester, NC State University Chancellor Randy Woodson says, was telling students to go home after they’d lived on campus just three weeks.

“It’s that first few weeks of school where you make new friends, you build community – and our students didn’t have time to do that,” Woodson says in the accompanying video.

Through efforts that include less-dense housing arrangements and more robust testing, university officials hope spring will be different.

“We have every intention (for) our students to be able to stay throughout the whole semester,” Woodson says. Though there are no guarantees amid a pandemic, “We’ve structured it in a way where that’s more likely than not,” he says.

“We’re doing that by having it much less dense and having a much more robust testing protocol. So even if we do have virus on campus, we believe we’ll be in a better position to limit its spread,” Woodson says.