Two Weeks: Experiencing COVID From the Perspective of the Different Classes
BY Sophia Goetz WITH art by Megan Bormann and Natalie Williams
Intro
On January 20th, 2020, the CDC reported the first laboratory-confirmed case of the 2019 then-novel Coronavirus in the United States and on the same day activated its Emergency Operations Center to respond to the emerging outbreak. Only two months later, on March 19th, 2020, The WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, its first such designation since announcing H1N1 influenza a pandemic in 2009. On the heels of its first outbreaks here in Minnesota, classes were postponed, and students were initially told that this disruption would only last “two weeks.” In just two weeks, classes would resume, and things would return to normal. Two weeks became two years, and in that period, COVID-19 significantly altered the college experience for most undergraduate students across the nation. With the help of vaccinations, more treatments, and immunity from earlier infections, the coronavirus may yet transition from a pandemic to an endemic state this year. However, the educational challenges left in the wake of the epidemic make it difficult for schools to foster academic growth and the mental and emotional health concerns that many students still struggle with due to the virus. Nearly two and a half years after COVID was declared a pandemic, this article reflects four different graduating classes’ perspectives at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. It hopes to benefit from their reflections on an academic world before COVID and their musings of a post-graduate future that the virus continues to alter. After two years of learning in front of blue screens, quarantined in tiny dorm rooms, and a “new normal,” we ask U of M students, “how are we doing?”
Class of ‘26
I guess you could say we’re lucky. Like, really lucky. I suppose others may look at getting to experience an in-person freshman year free of masks and asynchronous lectures as recompense for junior and senior years of high school spent in front of screens and shocking news headlines.
To most, beginning as a freshman at any university is a renewing experience, full of large expectations and excitement for the future. To me, it is also new, but for different reasons. Not only am I entering a whole new world of undergrad, but I also feel it is a whole new world of “post-COVID”, much of which seems surreal, perhaps even too good to be true.
Freshman year seems to come with not only a whole lot of excitement, but a whole lot of anxiety as well. Even as I begin my classes in person and without masking requirements, I still find myself pervaded with questions about the next four years here: “What if things get bad and we have to go online again?”, “Will I actually get to study abroad?”, and “Will I get to walk across a stage someday or have to see my name on a computer screen?”. Despite all of these questions, I am reminded of the fact that I am still here, now, on campus alongside good friends, professors, and staff who are here to support and guide me no matter what happens. Maybe lucky isn’t the right adjective; maybe it’s grateful.
Class of ‘25
I do not think it is out of the ordinary for high school graduation to feel weird for upperclassmen, but I suppose that depends on each person’s definition of “weird”. For me, mine was seeing four years' worth of education and achievement summed up in a three-second PowerPoint slide with my name and chosen university prepared in a block-type font.
Nearly all of high school was spent anticipating that big transition from living at home with my parents to living on a college campus. But as both my senior year and COVID progressed, things like studying abroad, football games, and autumn career fairs once promised to us by brochures, and enthusiastic campus tour guides grew further and further out of reach until the college experience we anticipated seemed like something of a fiction.
As I begin my sophomore year, I want to try to entertain a more positive attitude remembering that while COVID is “back”--and most likely will always be–so are tailgating, late-night cramming sessions in Walter Library, and homecoming parades. At the very least, it’s been weird.
Class of ‘24
I began school in the fall of 2020 when the end of the pandemic seemed within reach–or so we hoped. "Only fall semester will be online," I told myself, yet club meetings, lectures, and science labs kept me in a Zoom meeting at all hours of the day. It is hard enough making friends in college, but it was even worse then. By the end of spring 2021, however, I had found a group of friends, and I hoped the fall semester would be "normal," whatever that means anyway.
Fall of '21 came quickly, and I still wore a mask on my face wherever I went. As essential as underwear, an N95 never left my body, it seemed. Additionally, in-person classes were not as healing as I anticipated: Over the course of a fully online school year, I adjusted to the comfort of my home, and suddenly sitting in a lecture for even a 50-minute class was a chore. Learning in-person drained my social battery, recharging was essential during the weekend, and any time I wasn't wearing a mask, I felt naked.
Now, here we are, Fall '22, and the thought of wearing a mask seems distant—even though it was only four months ago the U had just lifted the mandate. And even though I am a junior, I feel like a sophomore. I wish the year spent online did not count, and I could have that time back, but I am fortunate that I can make up for the lost time. Nevertheless, it feels good to see someone's entire face when I talk to them, and I enjoy feeling more comfortable in public then.
Just be careful, still, because some people are still recovering, and COVID may never completely go away.
Class of ‘23
I experienced the commencement ceremony during my freshman year of Fall 2019 with friends seated beside me in the cavernous Northrop Auditorium. Anxious parents hauling dorm furniture and overstuffed suitcases, enthusiastic welcome week leaders herding their assigned freshmen from building to building, and returning students, that first week was abuzz with the promise of a new school year. For us freshmen, it was the promise of a new era. And it was a new era indeed, just not the one we had envisioned for ourselves.
My spring semester began with similar vigor, but it did not take long for the whisperings of a foreign and novel virus to evolve from fear-mongering fiction, into real-life chaos that soon quelled the excitement that usually follows the New Year. A couple of months later, I returned from Florida where I had spent my first ever collegiate spring break visiting friends and family to find the life I had left on campus drastically changed forever.
A “new normal,” greeted me with jugs of hand sanitizer, endless grocery store lines, and a mounting death toll flanked by a negligent President. That fall, at the beginning of my sophomore year, I watched the commencement ceremony again, this time seated on my childhood bed in the paltry glow of my computer screen.
Two years later, as I go into my fourth and final year of undergraduate here at the U, I can say while I wish the virus had never happened, I am both optimistic and confident regarding life not just after graduation but after COVID. Class of ‘23, we’ve got this.