Today: Mar 29, 2024

The midway point can be seen as a small victory

Jessica Guerrucci Editor-in-Chief

As students continue to juggle navigating through a pandemic and being in college, it’s certainly a unique time to be earning a degree and we’ve all made it to the midpoint of the semester despite the craziness around us.

There was a lot of speculation when students first returned to campus in last August about just how long the university would manage to stay open. You’d hear students say things like “Oh, just give it two weeks,” or “we’re not making it to Thanksgiving,” but it seems the bleak outlook may have taken a turn.

Students seem to be saying that they feel safe in their classes or being on campus. The university has managed to keep COVID-19 cases down with little to no trouble in terms of complying with policies.

We see schools around the state like Scared Heart who had to suspend more than 100 students for COVID-19 safety violations, according to NBC News and here at Southern that seems crazy or not even possible.

As the President of the CSCU’s, Mark Ojakian told me last week, “you all sold yourselves short” in terms of a college student’s ability to follow rules and help keep the virus contained even though we’ve been stereotyped as “lazy” or “irresponsible.”

And of course, we’ll surely have stories to tell as time goes by about how one day a virus completely changed the face of all our college educations and the times that we wore masks in all our classes.

But now we’ve made it midway. So, what begs the question is, what’s next?

Ahead, lies are steadily increasing COVID-19 rate across the state of Connecticut and midterm exams. Those two things shouldn’t typically go hand-in-hand, but that’s where our reality has taken us.

We’re all still anxiously holding our breath. Even if our mindset has changed or we feel safe, the stressors that come with being a college student and living through a pandemic are real and everyone is impacted in different ways. It’s surely taken a toll on everyone’s mental health.

The shift to entirely remote learning that lies ahead after Thanksgiving looms in the back of our minds and what that transition is going to be like after a seemingly chaotic shift back in March, which wasn’t anyone’s fault, but it will show how we’ve grown the second time around and if we made the necessary preparations going forward.

Even now that we’ve all adjusted to a new “normal” and a changed campus atmosphere, there’s still plenty of twists and turns along the way for us all to adapt to.

Remember to breathe and give yourself a break when going through midterm exams and pay attention to your mental health as you’re going through the rest of the semester.

So, let’s take reaching it midway as a win for now, or just a small victory.

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