Rachel's Story, Spring 2024

Rachel describes how she started college being isolated, sick, and restricted during the pandemic, and how this ultimately led her to a community she’s now grateful for.

So back in March 2020, it was my senior year of high school. There is no more hanging out with friends. There's no more seeing family because of the COVID-19 pandemic. So that was pretty in itself shocking. But then when you throw it into transitioning in life in such an important time, it kind of just messes everything up. So you're trying to decide where you're gonna go to college, but also then trying to decide when you're gonna see your grandparents next. So it's just kind of crazy.

It was first two weeks off of no school, and then we found out that we just weren't going back to school. On top of the whole world trying to figure it out, I'm also just an 18 year old girl trying to figure it out.

So come to summertime, things are back to normal a little bit. I get excited because me and my future roommate pick our housing, and then we get an email the next day that we actually can't go to campus at all. I found out that I was going to be starting college from my dining room table. So then you have the debate with yourself, is life ever gonna be normal again? So I kind of just feel like stuck in place and stuck in a time that's just, like, so weird.

I finished my first semester through the computer screen. Winter comes, we find out we can go to school and there is a glimmer of hope, which soon comes crashing down. We have to pick our housing again. Again, we're lucky enough we got rooms across the hall from each other. There is not a single soul on campus. Feels like a ghost town. And if you see UMass in the winter, it looks like a prison. And UMass was also like my last choice of schools I wanted to go to. So that, just all of this together was just a recipe for disaster in my eyes.

I meet my roommate. We hit it off, we go to the dining hall for the first time and everything is in to-go boxes. Everyone's masked up. We bring our food back cause you're not allowed to sit in the dining hall. And we sit with these girls that we met on our floor. And the RA comes and screams at us because we aren't allowed to be together. We don't have our masks on even though we're eating. And it's just like, I remember in that moment, like fearing that I was not going to make a friend in college because it physically was not possible.

And then three days into college, I got Covid and they sent us away to the housing that was furthest away from anywhere on campus, from civilization. Kids were asymptomatic and then there were kids in like drinking and partying, and then there were kids like me who were actually violently ill. Food was in the basement and we had to go down at a certain time. And if you didn't, if you were taking a nap and you missed when you were supposed to put your meals, then you didn't get to eat.

College is hard for anyone. It's, it's a new thing being thrown in in that sense was just like, I did not know if it was for me. And it was just like a very condescending feeling of like, will the college thing happen to me? Like, will I be able to succeed?

So after that, I get out of the quarantine building. It's one of our friends' birthdays, so we decide that we are going to make a cake. There's eight of us in a room, we don't have masks on. RA comes in, starts screaming, starts writing our names down, writing us up. This is our second right up, with your second right up, you get kicked off campus. I had to have a meeting with the dean of the school, all of us did, and fight to stay on campus.

In the end, we made it through. The weather got nicer, everyone got covid the first week so we didn't have to test anymore, started to get more social, started to make more friends. And in the end, like I just am so grateful that I stuck through it. I give my friends a lot of credit too, because this is everyone's first experience until such a transitional point in their life. It's, it's talked about your whole life about how this is such an important stage of, like, growing.

I think now I'm still so, I'm so grateful. Because if we moved in the first semester we were supposed to, we wouldn't have been in the building that we were in second semester, wouldn't have made the friends I have today. So, yeah, that's kind of just like how I didn't let such an obscure situation alter my experience of college.