Weather affects your service, so if there's a snowstorm where you're at OR where the ground station for your beam is at (always in a different state), you can potentially have loss of service. They can't do anything much about weather; it interferes with signals from space and that's basically that. I'm sure your instructors will understand.
*I am not a Hughesnet employee or representative. This is a customer-to-customer tech support community, and I am a customer.