Mark Goldman/Icon Sportswire AP
Student section before an Iowa Hawkeyes-Maryland Terrapins game, January 2020, College Park, Maryland. The university canceled the remainder of the spring semester in mid-March.
Around the second week of February, one of my University of Maryland English professors handed out a new version of his syllabus titled “PLAN B.” He explained that it would serve as a rough guide for the course in case COVID-19 permanently interrupted the semester. Many students, myself included, exchanged skeptical sideways glances. At that point, the worst any student expected was an extended spring break. The biggest step that the University of Maryland had taken was to suspend study abroad programs in China and advise Chinese international students to take precautions like quarantining in their dorms instead of going to large lectures.
At Yale, there was little discussion about the virus, according to Sasha Lee, a sociology major finishing up her junior year. “We honestly didn’t even really talk about it until March,” she told me. “Of course, people were being warned, but I think at that time, it was more of ‘don’t go to China, don’t go to Italy.’ Other than that, it was normal. People were still planning to travel during spring break.”
The lack of urgency displayed by President Trump contributed to these lackadaisical responses. Through the end of January into February, the president told Americans that COVID-19 was a “very small problem,” even as members of Congress and federal public-health officials urged him to respond more seriously. The characterization of the virus as an issue that was unique to China, combined with the early view that young people were virtually immune to COVID-19 and had nothing to worry about, made it all the more alarming when we were abruptly instructed not to return to campus after spring break.
My in-box was suddenly flooded with emails from professors, administrators—and my landlord—regarding the deadlines and protocols involved in the move-out process. Campus employers started laying off student workers. Study abroad programs and summer internships were canceled. Within the span of a week, my biggest priority had gone from trying to keep up with schoolwork to wondering if and how I’ll be employed this summer.
The transition to virtual learning has received mixed reviews. For some people, working from home has been a pleasant change of pace, providing a degree of much-needed solitude that can be hard to come by at a massive school like the University of Maryland. Fluid schedules have allowed some students to catch up on sleep, assignments, and spend time with family.
How can I even focus on school when every summer internship I applied for sends me an email that begins with some version of the phrase “unfortunately, due to the uncertainty surrounding the coronavirus pandemic” and ends with me even more stressed out than I was before I opened it?
Others have been tossed into academic limbo. The assignments are there (more so than usual, it seems), but it’s challenging to find the motivation and keep to a study schedule with a constant stream of family interruptions and international developments. It’s hard to understand how a university could expect students to operate as though nothing has changed, when most of us have never had our lives interrupted by a global pandemic. How can I be expected to write a ten-page paper on post-Marxist thought when hundreds of people are dying every day and I’m anxious about the well-being of my father, a public-sector essential employee?
What about students who must babysit younger siblings all day because their parents are essential employees?
How can I even focus on school when every summer internship I applied for sends me an email that begins with some version of the phrase “unfortunately, due to the uncertainty surrounding the coronavirus pandemic” and ends with me even more stressed out than I was before I opened it?
Meanwhile, remote instruction poses its own challenges. “There’s a way of inhabiting the classroom that just isn’t there,” says Jason Rudy, a University of Maryland English professor. “Most of the ways that I can tell if students are with me and engaged, or if they have questions, a lot of them are based on body language. I can see someone’s face scrunch up if they’re confused. I can see someone tense up or shift in their seat, and I can turn to that person and ask if they have something they’d like to contribute. A lot of those signals are much harder to perceive when I’m looking at a screen full of tiny boxes [on Zoom].”
The forced mass exodus was particularly distressing for graduating seniors like Senam Okpattah, a UMD public-policy major. UMD adopted a pass/fail system, and canceled important events like graduation without providing students with clear instructions about what would happen next or how to transition to an uncertain life after college.
Under this optional grading system, students can see where their grades stand at the end of the semester and receive either a “P” or an “F” unless they choose to receive a letter grade. Transcripts will note “unusual circumstances” (UMD shorthand for the pandemic), but many undergraduate students, especially those pursuing law or graduate programs, are apprehensive about pass/fail, since a grade of “P” has no impact on one’s grade point average. “For me, wanting to go to law school, or people pursuing a master’s, they still want those grades and have to opt in [to a letter grade] regardless,” says Okpattah.
She also worries about her diminished employment prospects. Even seniors who had secured jobs have had their career trajectories upended. Some employers have pushed back starting dates; others have completely rescinded their offers. “There have been talks of there being a new wave of a recession, and it being really difficult to find work, which is really stressful. It’s also hard to discern what your priorities are at a time when the entire world has been brought to a halt. I could be looking for a job but can’t go to an office. Are people hiring to work remotely? How many remote jobs are there? I’m not sure if those opportunities even exist for me right now,” she says.
Many university students who were already struggling to come to terms with a future of mounting debts, rumors of recession, and environmental threats like climate change have now been thrust into an academic and personal limbo that we can only hope will end in time to pick up where we left off. As for many college students, COVID-19 interrupted a university lifestyle that I had embraced. Now I stay inside and wait, having no idea when I’ll be on the College Park campus again or see my friends in person.
What I do know is this: Over the next few months as jobs, trips, conferences, and other career opportunities continue to vanish, college students will be paying close attention to the policy decisions made by leaders at all levels of government. Will lawmakers act to prioritize issues like student loan debt? If they don’t act decisively, that might just galvanize more than a few of us to make different decisions about how this country is run—and it won’t be long until we’re the ones replacing them.
