By Gracie Swind, Managing Editor
I feel cheated. 2020, the year from Hell, pretty much ruined my college experience.
I spent much of my high school years preparing for the university, wracking up as many credits as I could so I could save money in the long run. A degree isn’t cheap and I wasn’t keen on the idea of flippantly taking out multiple loans, each for thousands and thousands of dollars.
I took numerous advanced placement courses, studying hard to score threes and fours so I could get the maximum amount of transfer credits for the classes. I also enrolled in the Early Admissions program for my senior year of high school, attending Saint Petersburg Community College full time to earn thirty additional transfer credits and cover a number of prerequisite courses.
By the time I arrived at Saint Leo University in the fall of 2019, I had enough transfer credits to graduate with my bachelor’s degree in two years if I worked hard and overloaded my schedule each semester. I’m a quick learner and I bore with the same routine for too long, so two years to get “the college experience” seemed like enough for me.
Two years of living on campus, attending class, and enjoying the college life would have been enough for me, but 2020 had other plans. Thanks to lockdowns and a literal global pandemic, my “college experience” was knocked down from two years to seven measly months (eight if you count December during winter break).
In the rubble of my first year of university, I opted to attend Saint Leo in the fall via the Connected Classroom modality, as the state of affairs on campus looked bleak. Additionally, choosing to live at home while connected allowed me to keep my Presidential scholarship while also cutting the cost of my housing and meal plan completely; in the end, my family and I saved somewhere in the realm of $12,000 by my staying home and Zooming in to class.
This was a major benefit of the not-so-beneficial pandemic, since money and loans were a huge point of anxiety for both me and my family, but it was one of the only advantages. Since I was able to both work and attend school from home, I had no reason to leave the house; ergo, I essentially spent the last year in the same ten-foot by ten-foot room, staring at the same laptop, sleeping and resting and studying and working and relaxing in the same placeall day, every day.
Most times, it was agony, and I can safely say that I hate this house and this room now, which is sad. It feels like the last year was stolen from me, because I can’t remember most of it.
The days, weeks, months spent following the same routine – never really leaving the house, sitting at the same desk for six to eight hours a day, working on the same courses, pacing the same small house – blur together. There are very few days – or even weeks – I can specifically remember or pick out of the memory slush pot.
Everything has been nondescript for the longest time. Now that I’m at the end of the road, two years of hard work and overloaded semesters later, I’m not sure what to do.
I got my bachelor’s degree in English with a minor in theatre in two years, most of it completed online. In total, I took out $5,500 in loans.
It feels like I cheated the system a little bit, getting a degree this cheap and quick, but the system cheated me, too. I got one good year; one good year of being plugged in on campus, loving my job, meeting new people, engaging with the theatre, living the “college experience.”
In a lot of ways, I managed to get the gist of the “college experience” in just seven months; I got the SparkNotes version. Sitting here, writing this, I’m melancholic for the few brief moments I had on campus that were good—truly good—but the memories that are coming back to me are not what I expected.
I remember food: quiet dusks walking from my dorm room to the dining hall, sitting at an empty table watching YouTube, listening to music, or just decompressing over a plate of turkey, wheat pasta, sweet rolls, and Cajun cream sauce – my favorite dining hall meal that I still haven’t managed to recreate. Grabbing a fortune cookie for the road and a vanilla cappuccino for tomorrow morning, I’d head back to my room every night in a good mood.
I remember the theatre: Wednesday evenings in the fall staying up at the hill until after dark, working on patterns or props with music while theatre kids bobbed in and out of the workroom, making happy, familial racket between rehearsals and classwork. I created the gold dress for “Guys and Dolls” in an evening, six hours of sewing and chatting followed by a very satisfying night of sleep.
I remember so much about the newspaper: Monday meetings, covering off-campus events, interviewing professors and students, peaceful office hours on Friday mornings in the newsroom, our amazing trip to the newspaper conference last spring, luncheons with campus guests, and so many other opportunities and moments that would not have been available to me had I not been involved with the paper.
But for all the good moments that I can look back on and the few—but no less fond—memories I managed to eke out while staying home and Zooming in, there are so many things I didn’t get to do that I hoped to experience while in college. At the end of the day, I got the short-hand version of the college experience; most of the fault for that lies with a global pandemic, but I’d be remiss to say that some of it wasn’t my fault, too.
Whether it was an opportunity to socialize that I squandered or one of the disadvantages that came with my choice of university (Saint Leo was great, but it’s a small, private college in rural Florida; to say there weren’t some drawbacks to the school’s size and location would be dishonest), I missed out on some experiences that it might be too late to try and get back.
It’s over. My time as a college student – at least as far as undergraduate studies are concerned – is over.
So, what now? I’ll apply for jobs in my target field and hope for the best? Step boldly into a job market that has never looked so bleak and hesitant? Or maybe try to give myself – and the economy – more time to heal? Maybe look into a master’s program to get a second shot at those wasted “college experiences”?
I think the takeaway here, if there is one, is not that the last year was hard and I wanted to complain about it, so I wrote an article. No, I think the takeaway is to make every moment count. You never know how much time you’ll really have before life pushes you forward, whether you’re ready or not.
