A Guest Post by Ossian Heller
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School has never been something that I’ve enjoyed very much, aside from spending time with friends. Long before I got into college, I felt that in order for me to get the most out of it, I wanted to dictate the classes I would take. I am currently a sophomore at Bennington College, a small school in Vermont, and I chose Bennington in part because starting in my freshman year, I was able to choose all my classes with no required or ‘core’ subjects – this was important for me.
I had a good first semester at Bennington last year. But as a college student, my experience has been far from normal. I had just over one full semester actually on campus at college as a freshman. Bennington requires its students to have internships over the winter, which I also really like about the school. So our winter break lasts from Christmas until the middle of February in order to fit in the winter fieldwork term. But less than one month after completing that and returning to Vermont last year, I was back home in NYC again. As with most colleges, my brother’s included, we were all sent home due to COVID. Between my internship and COVID, during the course of the year, I ended up spending over 6 months at home taking online classes. Although this has allowed for more family time than there would have been otherwise, it can be difficult to ‘shelter in place’ with three other people, two cats, and a 65 pound dog in a small two bedroom apartment.
College is supposed to be a time to have fun with friends and learn new things, but also to be independent and figure out what you really want to do or not want to do after school. It’s a time to convince yourself and others that you’re able to live on your own and take care of yourself. As someone who wants to be an independent college student, being unable to remain at school has been difficult in continuing to achieve that goal. I had adapted to a new environment and then had to transition again, and found it easy to fall back into old habits. At school I have to care for myself, while at home I often wind up asking for help from my parents, even if help isn’t necessary.
The pandemic has taken a toll on people of all ages in so many different ways. Luckily for me, I had a home to go to, my parents were able to continue working (remotely), and I was able to get an internship again this winter. Since I go to a college that has only 800 students, there are tight policies in place which allowed for more normalcy than some larger schools, and we were welcomed back on campus this past fall. They required us to have weekly COVID testing and to practice consistent social distancing.
Being at school during the pandemic felt like a completely different environment than it was during my first semester of my freshman year. Although we were at school, classes were online, the dining hall only had takeout, masks were required, and we had to be socially distanced from one another. These rules made it difficult to have a normal college experience, but it was nice to have the ability to see friends and live on campus – living more normally than some of my friends at much larger schools who had to continue remotely from home.
It can be difficult for many people, myself included, to fully understand how and when society will become ‘normal’ again after the pandemic. There are so many unknowns. This past year has been far from normal for many people across the world, yet we have to do everything in our power to keep an open mind to whatever a new level of normal will look like.
