Thanks for all of the responses, people.

@Mentalist Traceur
Absolutely fantastic response. I appreciate it. Anyway, to answer your questions, I connected 1 time total and it worked flawlessly (during freshmen orientation) and when I came back a few weeks later at the beginning of the semester, it would not connect. To clarIify, the wi-fi doesn't even show up anymore. I installed many apps, mostly -extras but some -devel as well. I cannot remember what I downloaded exactly, do you suggest that I uninstall recent ones until the bug is gone?