College in the Pandemic
When you think back to your freshman year of college, what do you remember? Maybe it’s the thrill of orientation week, which is marked by an overwhelming rush of excitement as you meet an endless number of people. Maybe it’s the first football or basketball game you attended. Maybe it’s meeting your lifelong best friend in a large lecture class. Or maybe it’s the times spent youthfully dancing the night away.
As a college freshman this year, my year was immensely limited. Covid restrictions on campus meant that I — and hundreds of thousands of other freshmen across the nation — lost out on the typical college experience. There were no fanatic moments in the stands, no ethereal nights in the dance club, and no spontaneous mobs on the quad. Clubs and extracurriculars operated virtually, meaning that meeting people was difficult. With no large gatherings, social life became cliquey as people struggled to branch out of the groups they had settled into within the first few weeks of school.
The days became repetitive: Wake up. Log onto Zoom. Study for hours. Sleep. And then do it all over again. Because of Covid guidelines, there were no outlets to relieve stress. This was exacerbated by faster-paced semesters that were condensed to minimize travel and Covid risks. While universities today seem to be undertaking large-scale initiatives to promote mental health, the truth is that many students — myself included — felt stuck throughout the year. Unlike a student in a normal year, I didn’t feel like I was going to college; I felt like I was going to school. Amidst the hours spent toiling over complex organic reactions, I could feel myself losing grip of the world around me.
In the last week of school, while I was frantically preparing for finals, a cleaning lady came into the classroom that I normally studied in. This wasn’t anything out of the ordinary: every night around midnight she would come in, and we would exchange pleasantries before we each got back to our work. But on this particular night, she briefly paused her cleaning routine as she listened to the music that was playing from my computer. “I like this,” she commented as Mac Miller’s Swimming shuffle played.
Hoping to strike up more of a conversation, I told her more about Mac Miller when she came back around the room a few minutes later. “It’s quite sad. He died a few years ago from a drug overdose,” I informed her. She stopped scrubbing the table she was working on, almost as if to say something, but no words materialized. I thought that was it, but when she circled back around the room again, she stopped beside me and said, “You know, my son died from an overdose two years ago, too. He was clean for four years. He even started a business. They say rehab works, but you’re never really free.” As she finished cleaning the room, I could hear Mac Miller’s Swimming quietly playing from her phone’s speakers.
Walking home from the library that night, I was almost moved to tears — not simply because her story was tragic but because it woke me up from my trance. The incessant flow of work, coupled with the dearth of activities on campus, had made me forget what life was really like. The cleaning lady’s story reminded me that a whole world — one of triumph and tragedy, joy and pain — existed beyond my textbooks and my campus’s Covid bubble. I didn’t realize until that moment how detached from that world I had become. College during the pandemic had transformed life’s complex, beautiful, intricate, confusing emotions into one amorphous feeling: monotony.
As I reflect on my freshman year, I am overjoyed by the friendships that I made and the memories I formed despite the pandemic’s influence on my freshman year. But at the same time, I recognize that college during this unprecedented year placed me into the proverbial ivory tower. College — especially freshman year — is a period in your life when you are supposed to encounter new perspectives, see the world in a new way, and push yourself out of your comfort zone. While I am privileged to have been shielded from the immense hardships that many faced throughout the pandemic, I can’t help but wonder what I’ve lost during such a formative time in my life.
