Nicole Collins ’23 took a break from her Whittier College YouTube series to share how the COVID-19 measures have affected her first year in higher ed.
Hello everyone and welcome back to WC Insider with Nicole Collins. Obviously this is a new form of communication rather than seeing myself on screen, but I wanted to talk about these changes that are going on not only in the Whittier College community, but the whole world. With the coronavirus pandemic occurring, many changes had to be made to stop the spread of the virus.
Last month, Whittier joined campuses across the country in moving classes to remote instruction. If I’m being honest, these changes were quite a shock to me as I thought that it wasn’t possible for something like this to happen. But it has and I had to prepare for the next steps to come. Finding out about moving to online classes for two weeks was not much a shock because I thought to myself, “It’s only two weeks”. Well that quickly changed as we got an update telling us that they were going to have classes remotely for the remainder of the semester. Not only that, but we would also have to move out of our dorms.
During this time, I was so shocked and just thought the whole thing was surreal. After the first week of online classes, I would say that it’s a bit harder to keep up because when I am home I feel that I am on vacation and have no work. One of the hardest things of this transition is trying to motivate myself to do my work and keep up with my classes.
I will be honest and say that I love being home, but I’m also sad that I won’t be able to finish my first year of college on campus and spend more time with new friends that I have made. Moving out of my dorm and seeing it empty was not something I expected to see so soon, but it makes sense that they would have to go to these measures. Luckily I live in-state and not too far away from the school, so packing everything up was not such a difficult process. But it was hard to know that I wouldn’t be seeing my friends for almost six months, when we return for fall.
My feelings during this period are mixed, because I am sad I won’t be able to finish off my first semester on campus, but I also love and miss home. When we first made the transition, I didn’t know what to feel, but my main focus was to end with a good semester. Now that we’re a few weeks into online classes, I feel that I can get through these tough times. The transition to remote instruction has been a struggle, but I have learned to adjust and I feel confident on ending the semester on a good note.
I hope that everyone is staying safe and washing their hands and hopefully, together, we can get through this.
