By Ceci Omri
Guest Writer
After the announcement that school was temporarily cancelled due to COVID-19 in March, I never expected it to continuously impact the rest of my high school year as well as my Freshman year of university. In the chaos of quarantine and online school, I truly thought it would be a thing of the past when September came. Things are different now, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is fair to say college does not look the way I saw it in Gilmore Girls.
As an incoming freshman during a global pandemic, I can safely say I do not think there was anything my parents could have said that would prepare me for how different this looks compared to their first days of college. Living on campus means living in single rooms with no roommates, picking up take-out food from the dining hall, and wearing a mask when going to the bathroom. It definitely can get lonely! Without a roommate, sit-down dinners, or even dorm hall events, I speak for many freshmen when I say making friends has been a much more difficult feat.
With the social aspects aside, even the classes have evolved into something unknown to most of us freshmen. The workload looks dramatically different from a high school workload. Even as someone who did dual-credit at a community college, it still looks completely different. Learning the ins and outs of college courses can already be confusing; adding COVID-19 to the mix adds a new level of cluelessness because we aren’t in person to be able to ask these questions. Emails don’t produce the same conversations an in-person conversation does! I think professors are struggling just as much as we are with online courses. They are learning with us too, so it does help knowing the majority of them are flexible and considerate about corona-related problems, especially technological issues.
Even though this period is really difficult and there are plenty of things that can weigh us down and leave us anxiety-ridden, there are also some things I have noticed personally that I have appreciated. As a very introverted person, living on campus alone is not necessarily a bad thing, especially when I get time to myself in my own space. I am incredibly pleased with the way PLU has handled the protocols of the virus! The community is finding more creative ways to bond and be closer to each other with things like dorm Zoom calls and online activities.
Being a freshman during COVID-19 has plenty of challenges, and it is really easy to feel discouraged, maybe even a little bit stuck or unmotivated. The situation is nowhere near ideal, but honestly, I think knowing the people around me have dealt with the exact same thing helps us feel a lot more together.
