my first day at college after covid 19 essay

How to Write About Coronavirus in a College Essay

Students can share how they navigated life during the coronavirus pandemic in a full-length essay or an optional supplement.

Writing About COVID-19 in College Essays

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Experts say students should be honest and not limit themselves to merely their experiences with the pandemic.

The global impact of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, means colleges and prospective students alike are in for an admissions cycle like no other. Both face unprecedented challenges and questions as they grapple with their respective futures amid the ongoing fallout of the pandemic.

Colleges must examine applicants without the aid of standardized test scores for many – a factor that prompted many schools to go test-optional for now . Even grades, a significant component of a college application, may be hard to interpret with some high schools adopting pass-fail classes last spring due to the pandemic. Major college admissions factors are suddenly skewed.

"I can't help but think other (admissions) factors are going to matter more," says Ethan Sawyer, founder of the College Essay Guy, a website that offers free and paid essay-writing resources.

College essays and letters of recommendation , Sawyer says, are likely to carry more weight than ever in this admissions cycle. And many essays will likely focus on how the pandemic shaped students' lives throughout an often tumultuous 2020.

But before writing a college essay focused on the coronavirus, students should explore whether it's the best topic for them.

Writing About COVID-19 for a College Application

Much of daily life has been colored by the coronavirus. Virtual learning is the norm at many colleges and high schools, many extracurriculars have vanished and social lives have stalled for students complying with measures to stop the spread of COVID-19.

"For some young people, the pandemic took away what they envisioned as their senior year," says Robert Alexander, dean of admissions, financial aid and enrollment management at the University of Rochester in New York. "Maybe that's a spot on a varsity athletic team or the lead role in the fall play. And it's OK for them to mourn what should have been and what they feel like they lost, but more important is how are they making the most of the opportunities they do have?"

That question, Alexander says, is what colleges want answered if students choose to address COVID-19 in their college essay.

But the question of whether a student should write about the coronavirus is tricky. The answer depends largely on the student.

"In general, I don't think students should write about COVID-19 in their main personal statement for their application," Robin Miller, master college admissions counselor at IvyWise, a college counseling company, wrote in an email.

"Certainly, there may be exceptions to this based on a student's individual experience, but since the personal essay is the main place in the application where the student can really allow their voice to be heard and share insight into who they are as an individual, there are likely many other topics they can choose to write about that are more distinctive and unique than COVID-19," Miller says.

Opinions among admissions experts vary on whether to write about the likely popular topic of the pandemic.

"If your essay communicates something positive, unique, and compelling about you in an interesting and eloquent way, go for it," Carolyn Pippen, principal college admissions counselor at IvyWise, wrote in an email. She adds that students shouldn't be dissuaded from writing about a topic merely because it's common, noting that "topics are bound to repeat, no matter how hard we try to avoid it."

Above all, she urges honesty.

"If your experience within the context of the pandemic has been truly unique, then write about that experience, and the standing out will take care of itself," Pippen says. "If your experience has been generally the same as most other students in your context, then trying to find a unique angle can easily cross the line into exploiting a tragedy, or at least appearing as though you have."

But focusing entirely on the pandemic can limit a student to a single story and narrow who they are in an application, Sawyer says. "There are so many wonderful possibilities for what you can say about yourself outside of your experience within the pandemic."

He notes that passions, strengths, career interests and personal identity are among the multitude of essay topic options available to applicants and encourages them to probe their values to help determine the topic that matters most to them – and write about it.

That doesn't mean the pandemic experience has to be ignored if applicants feel the need to write about it.

Writing About Coronavirus in Main and Supplemental Essays

Students can choose to write a full-length college essay on the coronavirus or summarize their experience in a shorter form.

To help students explain how the pandemic affected them, The Common App has added an optional section to address this topic. Applicants have 250 words to describe their pandemic experience and the personal and academic impact of COVID-19.

"That's not a trick question, and there's no right or wrong answer," Alexander says. Colleges want to know, he adds, how students navigated the pandemic, how they prioritized their time, what responsibilities they took on and what they learned along the way.

If students can distill all of the above information into 250 words, there's likely no need to write about it in a full-length college essay, experts say. And applicants whose lives were not heavily altered by the pandemic may even choose to skip the optional COVID-19 question.

"This space is best used to discuss hardship and/or significant challenges that the student and/or the student's family experienced as a result of COVID-19 and how they have responded to those difficulties," Miller notes. Using the section to acknowledge a lack of impact, she adds, "could be perceived as trite and lacking insight, despite the good intentions of the applicant."

To guard against this lack of awareness, Sawyer encourages students to tap someone they trust to review their writing , whether it's the 250-word Common App response or the full-length essay.

Experts tend to agree that the short-form approach to this as an essay topic works better, but there are exceptions. And if a student does have a coronavirus story that he or she feels must be told, Alexander encourages the writer to be authentic in the essay.

"My advice for an essay about COVID-19 is the same as my advice about an essay for any topic – and that is, don't write what you think we want to read or hear," Alexander says. "Write what really changed you and that story that now is yours and yours alone to tell."

Sawyer urges students to ask themselves, "What's the sentence that only I can write?" He also encourages students to remember that the pandemic is only a chapter of their lives and not the whole book.

Miller, who cautions against writing a full-length essay on the coronavirus, says that if students choose to do so they should have a conversation with their high school counselor about whether that's the right move. And if students choose to proceed with COVID-19 as a topic, she says they need to be clear, detailed and insightful about what they learned and how they adapted along the way.

"Approaching the essay in this manner will provide important balance while demonstrating personal growth and vulnerability," Miller says.

Pippen encourages students to remember that they are in an unprecedented time for college admissions.

"It is important to keep in mind with all of these (admission) factors that no colleges have ever had to consider them this way in the selection process, if at all," Pippen says. "They have had very little time to calibrate their evaluations of different application components within their offices, let alone across institutions. This means that colleges will all be handling the admissions process a little bit differently, and their approaches may even evolve over the course of the admissions cycle."

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Yale Daily News

PERSONAL ESSAY: On Graduating in a Pandemic

Contributing Reporter

Four years ago, I entered Yale as part of the class of 2021, and now the year I both dreaded and anticipated is here. It’s 2021; my senior spring. What I imagined would be a victory lap after three and a half of the best years of my life looks a lot more like a slog to an ever-moving finish line. Almost every part of my imagined college experience has changed, and these changes due to COVID — multiplied over the thousands of seniors graduating this year and last — produce an impact that we will feel for years to come.

My former suitemates, whom I’ve spent many nights with imagining the future, are now in different cities across the U.S. When I first came to Yale, my idealized college experience was centered around our suite unit; I imagined that we would weather four years of Yale, then enter the rest of the world together. Instead, only three out of my six suitemates from sophomore year are still graduating in 2021, and all of us are headed to very different futures than we had imagined. What remains of our graduating class resembles my ex-suite: altered plans and changed people, staggering in unexpected new directions.

I called those of my former suitemates who are still graduating — pseudonymized here as Paris, Maia and Luisa — and we discussed where we might be in the next couple years. The following are imagined futures loosely based upon these conversations.

In 2024, PARIS lives in a sun-soaked 15th-story apartment, the fourth or fifth she’s lived in since graduating, with a windowsill full of plants: philodendrons, African violets, basil, a Venus flytrap. Her dark hair is now short, shorter than it’s been since college, and her apartment-mates are what she would describe as “boss ladies.” Her phone beeps with a text from one of the teenage girls that she works with at her job as a community organizer; the sound wakes up her pitbull, who lazily flaps an ear and curls back up against the back of her desk chair.

It will be three years since Paris left New Haven and fled to new cities to escape a suffocating senior year spent in quarantine. Feeling that COVID catapulted her prematurely into adulthood, Paris ran in the opposite direction of a stable “adult” job. After graduating, she spent time backpacking in South America, teaching in Spain and organizing in Philadelphia. She went wherever there was movement and action and young people. The wanderer lifestyle she chose was in direct reaction to the sensation of being stuck.

Paris has switched therapists several times over the course of the three years because she always felt like progress wasn’t being made in sessions. Somehow, the pandemic never quite leaves the conversation. Her wanderlust and rejection of normal, “age-appropriate” behavior feels like the continuation of senior year: no demarcation between one chapter ending and another beginning; continual limbo. Her near-excessive accumulation of plants, pets, books, artwork, things , according to her newest therapist, Alicia, represents the anchors that Paris uses to prevent herself from floating away entirely. And her retreat from many of the friends she had made in college, Alicia tells her, may be the response to having grown disconnected from the emotional states of others — she feels alone, and has come to believe that she is alone in feeling alone. Everyone else is a monolith of unrelatable, happy people and she quickly falls away from them, feeling like there is little mutual ground for conversation left.

In 2023, MAIA has joined the consulting company that she has worked for since sophomore summer. She still keeps in touch with a handful of people from college, but she spends most of her time texting her cohort at work about the ever-changing demands of their entertainment industry clientele. Maia recently started seeing someone, but she realizes she doesn’t have a lot of patience for things like nights out. She occasionally does productions with a local theater group, but even that feels like work sometimes.

Graduation had been dampened by so many other competing demands. What once was celebratory and important, had become decidedly… not. Maia rationalized to herself that graduation mattered so little in the context of people losing their loved ones to a raging virus; she had herself so thoroughly convinced that by the time the virtual event came and went, it had long been classified as a forgettable memory. Pomp and circumstance, the commemoration of accomplishment — all foreign concepts. Change was dulled; the anticlimactic feeling of leaving college and starting work was further reinforced by having already spent six months at home, unable to see friends, with the only noticeable change in her day-to-day being a Zoom link with a corporate header instead of a Yale one.

Now a full-fledged member of the workforce, Maia finds that there was no celebration there either. At a company that had once mailed their prospective employees cupcakes to woo them into signing, Maia has not yet tasted a single company-sponsored dessert nor attended a cheese-tasting event. There is no more wining and dining, much less company-sponsored recreation, and even a reduction in company merch. She tells herself, logically, they know you won’t reject a job during COVID, and they are right. And who am I to complain when others are unemployed? The work we do is the most important thing, anyway, she tells herself. The days of after-show parties and spontaneous happy hours are long gone.

Instead of fun with friends, the pleasures of life look a lot more like solitude at home. Since senior year, Maia has begun to enjoy the growth she notices in herself. She has learned more about how to be an adult — cooking recipes, paying rent, being able to decide when to start working and when to stop (the stopping is still hard sometimes). She feels gratitude for the friends that she still talks to from time to time, and for the ordinary things like warm showers and cold drinks. She is getting better at being alone.

In 2022, LUISA, with her plaid backpack and teal Yeti rambler (the same one from sophomore year of Yale), is back to the books, spending most of her time exactly where she had planned for senior year: in libraries and coffee shops. The backdrop has changed, but the rhythms of academia remain a wonderful constant. She misses stability so much that her craving for certainty makes her return to school. The master’s degree wasn’t part of the plan, but neither was this virus, and school feels like the closest thing to normal, even if everything has to be from a laptop.

Luisa is impressed with herself for how well she deals with unmet expectations. Friendships were permanently fractured because of the distance created by the pandemic, and past Luisa would have been torn up every night. Instead, she feels a sense of emptiness where there once lived feelings like attachment. “ Maybe if we had been sophomores, the gaps would have slowly been closed again over time , but because of the lasting impression of people in masks keeping distance, dwindingly friendships a year out seem only natural,” she writes in her brand-new Moleskine — teal, like the rambler. The premature separation from her classmates by geographical location, by gap-year “1.5” graduating class divisions, by on- and off-campus, sucks. Luisa feels like they had been rushed into the next phase of their lives before even making it to the climax of the current one. All the more reason, she thinks, to tether herself to some semblance of normalcy: Her weekly course calendar is something she can rely on.

It’s 2021 and I sit in my off-campus apartment, daydreaming about the future and wondering where this spring season will take us. I stare outside the window, wondering when I’ll finally be free from this longing feeling for a chance to gather with my ex-suitemates, to be free of hypervigilance about safety and cleanliness, to just have a sleepover or meet a new friend without worry. I think about my plans to stay in the city next year, and about all the missed potential from an ideal senior year.

The only thing I appreciate is this: Right before we got sent home, I was hurtling toward disaster, going 100 miles per minute into the future, and COVID forced me to slow down. I was forced to recognize the beauty in the slow. Graduation has historically been all about projecting into the future — anticipating what’s to come, cherishing the bright spots within these precious college years, formation and self-discovery in an ever-accelerating landscape. Pandemic graduation seems to be about having the brakes thrown into our plans, and being forced to sit still and alone for a very long time.

Every year, college grads bid goodbye to their family away from home. The difference, this year and the last, is that we did not see our goodbyes coming. Who knew that the last time we’d see Jimmy from Davenport was that final Friday in “Game Theory,” or that we should have hugged Collin from FOOT goodbye when we passed him on the street? Our plans changed; the people in our lives changed. Some of us who thought we would stay in New Haven exited this pandemic deciding it was time to go; and others who entered thinking it was a get-the-degree and get-out situation, found themselves wanting to stay just one more year in New Haven. One more normal year. Disparities and distance grew between the employed and the still-searching; our support systems, the ones that should have been solidified during these past four years, are flimsy at best as we get shuttled into the rest of our adult lives. And yet we persist. We try to bring back the dinners, the movie nights. We make plans once again. We gather as a suite on Zoom and dream out loud about the people we’ll meet, the things we’ll do and the places we’ll go once we graduate into this pandemic and out into the rest of the world. Each of us four departing seniors head in different directions, none of us knowing exactly where we will land. All we have to fuel us onward are some precious memories of the good old days, and faith that we are resilient enough to get through graduating, even in a pandemic.

Kalina Mladenova

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‘When Normal Life Stopped’: College Essays Reflect a Turbulent Year

This year’s admissions essays became a platform for high school seniors to reflect on the pandemic, race and loss.

By Anemona Hartocollis

This year perhaps more than ever before, the college essay has served as a canvas for high school seniors to reflect on a turbulent and, for many, sorrowful year. It has been a psychiatrist’s couch, a road map to a more hopeful future, a chance to pour out intimate feelings about loneliness and injustice.

In response to a request from The New York Times, more than 900 seniors submitted the personal essays they wrote for their college applications. Reading them is like a trip through two of the biggest news events of recent decades: the devastation wrought by the coronavirus, and the rise of a new civil rights movement.

In the wake of the high-profile deaths of Black people like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police officers, students shared how they had wrestled with racism in their own lives. Many dipped their feet into the politics of protest, finding themselves strengthened by their activism, yet sometimes conflicted.

And in the midst of the most far-reaching pandemic in a century, they described the isolation and loss that have pervaded every aspect of their lives since schools suddenly shut down a year ago. They sought to articulate how they have managed while cut off from friends and activities they had cultivated for years.

To some degree, the students were responding to prompts on the applications, with their essays taking on even more weight in a year when many colleges waived standardized test scores and when extracurricular activities were wiped out.

This year the Common App, the nation’s most-used application, added a question inviting students to write about the impact of Covid-19 on their lives and educations. And universities like Notre Dame and Lehigh invited applicants to write about their reactions to the death of George Floyd, and how that inspired them to make the world a better place.

The coronavirus was the most common theme in the essays submitted to The Times, appearing in 393 essays, more than 40 percent. Next was the value of family, coming up in 351 essays, but often in the context of other issues, like the pandemic and race. Racial justice and protest figured in 342 essays.

“We find with underrepresented populations, we have lots of people coming to us with a legitimate interest in seeing social justice established, and they are looking to see their college as their training ground for that,” said David A. Burge, vice president for enrollment management at George Mason University.

Family was not the only eternal verity to appear. Love came up in 286 essays; science in 128; art in 110; music in 109; and honor in 32. Personal tragedy also loomed large, with 30 essays about cancer alone.

Some students resisted the lure of current events, and wrote quirky essays about captaining a fishing boat on Cape Cod or hosting dinner parties. A few wrote poetry. Perhaps surprisingly, politics and the 2020 election were not of great interest.

Most students expect to hear where they were admitted by the end of March or beginning of April. Here are excerpts from a few of the essays, edited for length.

Nandini Likki

Nandini, a senior at the Seven Hills School in Cincinnati, took care of her father after he was hospitalized with Covid-19. It was a “harrowing” but also rewarding time, she writes.

When he came home, my sister and I had to take care of him during the day while my mom went to work. We cooked his food, washed his dishes, and excessively cleaned the house to make sure we didn’t get the disease as well.

It was an especially harrowing time in my life and my mental health suffered due to the amount of stress I was under.

However, I think I grew emotionally and matured because of the experience. My sister and I became more responsible as we took on more adult roles in the family. I grew even closer to my dad and learned how to bond with him in different ways, like using Netflix Party to watch movies together. Although the experience isolated me from most of my friends who couldn’t relate to me, my dad’s illness taught me to treasure my family even more and cherish the time I spend with them.

Nandini has been accepted at Case Western and other schools.

Grace Sundstrom

Through her church in Des Moines, Grace, a senior at Roosevelt High School, began a correspondence with Alden, a man who was living in a nursing home and isolated by the pandemic.

As our letters flew back and forth, I decided to take a chance and share my disgust about the treatment of people of color at the hands of police officers. To my surprise, Alden responded with the same sentiments and shared his experience marching in the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

Here we were, two people generations apart, finding common ground around one of the most polarizing subjects in American history.

When I arrived at my first Black Lives Matter protest this summer, I was greeted by the voices of singing protesters. The singing made me think of a younger Alden, stepping off the train at Union Station in Washington, D.C., to attend the 1963 March on Washington.

Grace has been admitted to Trinity University in San Antonio and is waiting to hear from others.

Ahmed AlMehri

Ahmed, who attends the American School of Kuwait, wrote of growing stronger through the death of his revered grandfather from Covid-19.

Fareed Al-Othman was a poet, journalist and, most importantly, my grandfather. Sept. 8, 2020, he fell victim to Covid-19. To many, he’s just a statistic — one of the “inevitable” deaths. But to me, he was, and continues to be, an inspiration. I understand the frustration people have with the restrictions, curfews, lockdowns and all of the tertiary effects of these things.

But I, personally, would go through it all a hundred times over just to have my grandfather back.

For a long time, things felt as if they weren’t going to get better. Balancing the grief of his death, school and the upcoming college applications was a struggle; and my stress started to accumulate. Covid-19 has taken a lot from me, but it has forced me to grow stronger and persevere. I know my grandfather would be disappointed if I had let myself use his death as an excuse to slack off.

Ahmed has been accepted by the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Miami and is waiting to hear from others.

Mina Rowland

Mina, who lives in a shelter in San Joaquin County, Calif., wrote of becoming homeless in middle school.

Despite every day that I continue to face homelessness, I know that I have outlets for my pain and anguish.

Most things that I’ve had in life have been destroyed, stolen, lost, or taken, but art and poetry shall be with me forever.

The stars in “Starry Night” are my tenacity and my hope. Every time I am lucky enough to see the stars, I am reminded of how far I’ve come and how much farther I can go.

After taking a gap year, Mina and her twin sister, Mirabell, have been accepted at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore and are waiting on others.

Christine Faith Cabusay

Christine, a senior at Stuyvesant High School in New York, decided to break the isolation of the pandemic by writing letters to her friends.

How often would my friends receive something in the mail that was not college mail, a bill, or something they ordered online? My goal was to make opening a letter an experience. I learned calligraphy and Spencerian script so it was as if an 18th-century maiden was writing to them from her parlor on a rainy day.

Washing lines in my yard held an ever-changing rainbow of hand-recycled paper.

With every letter came a painting of something that I knew they liked: fandoms, animals, music, etc. I sprayed my favorite perfume on my signature on every letter because I read somewhere that women sprayed perfume on letters overseas to their partners in World War II; it made writing letters way more romantic (even if it was just to my close friends).

Christine is still waiting to hear from schools.

Alexis Ihezue

Her father’s death from complications of diabetes last year caused Alexis, a student at the Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science and Technology in Lawrenceville, Ga., to consider the meaning of love.

And in the midst of my grief swallowing me from the inside out, I asked myself when I loved him most, and when I knew he loved me. It’s nothing but brief flashes, like bits and pieces of a dream. I hear him singing “Fix You” by Coldplay on our way home, his hands across the table from me at our favorite wing spot that we went to weekly after school, him driving me home in the middle of a rainstorm, his last message to me congratulating me on making it to senior year.

It’s me finding a plastic spoon in the sink last week and remembering the obnoxious way he used to eat. I see him in bursts and flashes.

A myriad of colors and experiences. And I think to myself, ‘That’s what it is.’ It’s a second. It’s a minute. That’s what love is. It isn’t measured in years, but moments.

Alexis has been accepted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is waiting on others.

Ivy Wanjiku

She and her mother came to America “with nothing but each other and $100,” writes Ivy, who was born in Kenya and attends North Cobb High School in Kennesaw, Ga.

I am a triple threat. Foreign, black, female. From the dirt roads and dust that covered the attire of my ancestors who worshiped the soil, I have sprouted new beginnings for generations.

But the question arises; will that generation live to see its day?

Melanin mistaken as a felon, my existence is now a hashtag that trends as often as my rights, a facade at best, a lie in truth. I now know more names of dead blacks than I do the amendments of the Constitution.

Ivy is going to Emory University in Atlanta on full scholarship and credits her essay with helping her get in.

Mary Clare Marshall

The isolation of the pandemic became worse when Mary Clare, a student at Sacred Heart Greenwich in Connecticut, realized that her mother had cancer.

My parents acted like everything was normal, but there were constant reminders of her diagnosis. After her first chemo appointment, I didn’t acknowledge the change. It became real when she came downstairs one day without hair.

No one said anything about the change. It just happened. And it hit me all over again. My mom has cancer.

Even after going to Catholic school for my whole life, I couldn’t help but be angry at God. I felt myself experiencing immense doubt in everything I believe in. Unable to escape my house for any small respite, I felt as though I faced the reality of my mom’s cancer totally alone.

Mary Clare has been admitted to the University of Virginia and is waiting on other schools.

Nora Frances Kohnhorst

Nora, a student at the High School of American Studies at Lehman College in New York, was always “a serial dabbler,” but found commitment in a common pandemic hobby.

In March, when normal life stopped, I took up breadmaking. This served a practical purpose. The pandemic hit my neighborhood in Queens especially hard, and my parents were afraid to go to the store. This forced my family to come up with ways to avoid shopping. I decided I would learn to make sourdough using recipes I found online. Initially, some loaves fell flat, others were too soft inside, and still more spread into strange blobs.

I reminded myself that the bread didn’t need to be perfect, just edible.

It didn’t matter what it looked like; there was no one to see or eat it besides my brother and parents. They depended on my new activity, and that dependency prevented me from repeating the cycle of trying a hobby, losing steam, and moving on to something new.

Nora has been admitted to SUNY Binghamton and the University of Vermont and is waiting to hear from others.

Gracie Yong Ying Silides

Gracie, a student at Greensboro Day School in North Carolina, recalls the “red thread” of a Chinese proverb and wonders where it will take her next.

Destiny has led me into a mysterious place these last nine months: isolation. At a time in my life when I am supposed to be branching out, the Covid pandemic seems to have trimmed those branches back to nubs. I have had to research colleges without setting foot on them. I’ve introduced myself to strangers through essays, videos, and test scores.

I would have fallen apart over this if it weren’t for my faith.

In Hebrews 11:1, Paul says that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” My life has shown me that the red thread of destiny guides me where I need to go. Though it might sound crazy, I trust that the red thread is guiding me to the next phase of my journey.

Gracie has been accepted to St. Olaf College, Ithaca College and others.

Levi, a student at Westerville Central High School in Ohio, wrestles with the conflict between her admiration for her father, a police officer, and the negative image of the police.

Since I was a small child I have watched my father put on his dark blue uniform to go to work protecting and serving others. He has always been my hero. As the African-American daughter of a police officer, I believe in what my father stands for, and I am so proud of him because he is not only my protector, but the protector of those I will likely never know. When I was young, I imagined him always being a hero to others, just as he was to me. How could anyone dislike him??? However, as I have gotten older and watched television and social media depict the brutalization of African-Americans, at the hands of police, I have come to a space that is uncomfortable.

I am certain there are others like me — African-Americans who love their police officer family members, yet who despise what the police are doing to African-Americans.

I know that I will not be able to rectify this problem alone, but I want to be a part of the solution where my paradox no longer exists.

Levi has been accepted to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, and is waiting to hear from others.

Henry Thomas Egan

When Henry, a student at Creighton Preparatory School in Omaha, attended a protest after the death of George Floyd, it was the words of a Nina Simone song that stayed with him.

I had never been to a protest before; neither my school, nor my family, nor my city are known for being outspoken. Thousands lined the intersection in all four directions, chanting, “He couldn’t breathe! George Floyd couldn’t breathe!”

In my head, thoughts of hunger, injustice, and silence swirled around.

In my ears, I heard lyrics playing on a speaker nearby, a song by Nina Simone: “To be young, gifted, and Black!” The experience was exceptionally sad and affirming and disorienting at the same time, and when the police arrived and started firing tear gas, I left. A lot has happened in my life over these last four years. I am left not knowing how to sort all of this out and what paths I should follow.

Henry has not yet heard back from colleges.

Anna Valades

Anna, a student at Coronado High School in California, pondered how children learned racism from their parents.

“She said I wasn’t invited to her birthday party because I was black,” my sister had told my mom, devastated, after coming home from third grade as the only classmate who had not been invited to the party. Although my sister is not black, she is a dark-skinned Mexican, and brown-skinned people in Mexico are thought of as being a lower class and commonly referred to as “negros.” When my mom found out who had been discriminating against my sister, she later informed me that the girl’s mother had also bullied my mom about her skin tone when she was in elementary school in Mexico City.

Through this situation, I learned the impact people’s upbringing and the values they are taught at home have on their beliefs and, therefore, their actions.

Anna has been accepted at Northeastern University and is waiting to hear from others.

Research was contributed by Asmaa Elkeurti, Aidan Gardiner, Pierre-Antoine Louis and Jake Frankenfield.

Anemona Hartocollis is a national correspondent, covering higher education. She is also the author of the book, “Seven Days of Possibilities: One Teacher, 24 Kids, and the Music That Changed Their Lives Forever.” More about Anemona Hartocollis

Writing about COVID-19 in a college admission essay

by: Venkates Swaminathan | Updated: September 14, 2020

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Writing about COVID-19 in your college admission essay

For students applying to college using the CommonApp, there are several different places where students and counselors can address the pandemic’s impact. The different sections have differing goals. You must understand how to use each section for its appropriate use.

The CommonApp COVID-19 question

First, the CommonApp this year has an additional question specifically about COVID-19 :

Community disruptions such as COVID-19 and natural disasters can have deep and long-lasting impacts. If you need it, this space is yours to describe those impacts. Colleges care about the effects on your health and well-being, safety, family circumstances, future plans, and education, including access to reliable technology and quiet study spaces. Please use this space to describe how these events have impacted you.

This question seeks to understand the adversity that students may have had to face due to the pandemic, the move to online education, or the shelter-in-place rules. You don’t have to answer this question if the impact on you wasn’t particularly severe. Some examples of things students should discuss include:

The student or a family member had COVID-19 or suffered other illnesses due to confinement during the pandemic.
The candidate had to deal with personal or family issues, such as abusive living situations or other safety concerns
The student suffered from a lack of internet access and other online learning challenges.
Students who dealt with problems registering for or taking standardized tests and AP exams.

Jeff Schiffman of the Tulane University admissions office has a blog about this section. He recommends students ask themselves several questions as they go about answering this section:

Are my experiences different from others’?
Are there noticeable changes on my transcript?
Am I aware of my privilege?
Am I specific? Am I explaining rather than complaining?
Is this information being included elsewhere on my application?

If you do answer this section, be brief and to-the-point.

Counselor recommendations and school profiles

Second, counselors will, in their counselor forms and school profiles on the CommonApp, address how the school handled the pandemic and how it might have affected students, specifically as it relates to:

Grading scales and policies
Graduation requirements
Instructional methods
Schedules and course offerings
Testing requirements
Your academic calendar
Other extenuating circumstances

Students don’t have to mention these matters in their application unless something unusual happened.

Writing about COVID-19 in your main essay

Write about your experiences during the pandemic in your main college essay if your experience is personal, relevant, and the most important thing to discuss in your college admission essay. That you had to stay home and study online isn’t sufficient, as millions of other students faced the same situation. But sometimes, it can be appropriate and helpful to write about something related to the pandemic in your essay. For example:

One student developed a website for a local comic book store. The store might not have survived without the ability for people to order comic books online. The student had a long-standing relationship with the store, and it was an institution that created a community for students who otherwise felt left out.
One student started a YouTube channel to help other students with academic subjects he was very familiar with and began tutoring others.
Some students used their extra time that was the result of the stay-at-home orders to take online courses pursuing topics they are genuinely interested in or developing new interests, like a foreign language or music.

Experiences like this can be good topics for the CommonApp essay as long as they reflect something genuinely important about the student. For many students whose lives have been shaped by this pandemic, it can be a critical part of their college application.

Want more? Read 6 ways to improve a college essay , What the &%$! should I write about in my college essay , and Just how important is a college admissions essay? .

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A Pandemic College Essay That Probably Won’t Get You Into Brown

By Michael Ian Black

Community disruptions such as COVID -19 and natural disasters can have deep and long-lasting impacts. If you need it, this space is yours to describe those impacts. — The 2020-21 college-admissions Common Application.

COVID -19 is a very destructive respiratory disease that has caused much pain and suffering for millions of people around the world. Although my heart grieves for all the lives lost, each of us has suffered in our own unique ways. For me, that suffering took the form of not getting an opportunity to play the lead in our spring drama, which was, so tragically, cancelled.

For years, I have been working toward this goal. As a freshman, I auditioned for the role of Laura in the Tennessee Williams famous American drama “The Glass Menagerie.” While I did not win the role, I find it very ironic that now, only three years later, we have all become aware that life is as precious as those fateful glass figurines due to COVID -19.

As a sophomore, my efforts to secure the role of the wrongly accused Desdemona in William Shakespeare’s important play “Othello” were, once again, thwarted. Our drama coach, Ms. Wilkie, told me during the audition process that sophomores would be considered for leading roles, but the parts of Othello, Iago, and Desdemona all went to upperclassmen, even though none of them had taken private acting classes, as I have, with Leonard Michaels (Broadway credits include “Company,” “Starlight Express,” “Pump Boys and Dinettes”), at the Willows Dramatic Academy for Young Performers.

This experience taught me that authority figures do not always have “the answers,” a lesson reinforced when Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is a very respected medical adviser to many Presidents of the United States of America, said at first that masks should not be worn but then said that they should.

When discussing masks these days, it is impossible not to conjure in one’s mind images of the famous “Comedy and Tragedy” masks, which were worn in ancient Greece during the classical period, from approximately 500 to 300 B.C.

Junior year was a turning point for my high-school theatrical career. I auditioned to portray Abigail Williams in “The Crucible,” a play that on the surface purports to be about the Salem witch trials but is in fact a parable about McCarthyism, which was a terrible episode of American history that itself had a long-lasting impact on American history. Although I did not receive the part of Abigail Williams, I did play the pivotal role of Deputy Governor Danforth, who has several lines. Our school newspaper declared my presentation “dramatic” (review attached).

This year, my senior year, Ms. Wilkie said that we would be doing the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “Our Town.” Never could I have foreseen that “our town” would be affected by the respiratory disease only a few short months later.

Needless to say, I watched in horror in January and February of last year as news reports emerged from China about a new respiratory ailment that threatened to sicken people and shut down vast portions of the economy. In March, we received word that our very high school would be closing its mahogany doors. The curtain on my high-school theatrical career, tragically, fell forever, before I even had the chance to audition for the central role of the Stage Manager, which I planned to reinterpret as a strong, independent woman in the wake of #MeToo.

Perhaps Fate is the real Stage Manager.

The Stanislavski method of acting teaches us to incorporate our actual experiences into our Craft. Should I have the great honor of studying at the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University, I vow to incorporate the suffering of this past year into my Art as a tribute to all those, including myself, who have experienced such tremendous loss.

It is believed that the immortal bard, William Shakespeare, said, “Instead of weeping when a tragedy occurs in a songbird’s life, it sings away its grief.” My time at Brown will be my chance to “sing away grief,” except that, unlike the tragedies of Shakespeare and other playwrights, my tragedy is real and therefore more tragic.

Please find attached a video of me in a scene from Herb Gardner’s “A Thousand Clowns” (performed with J. Leonard Mitchell, member, Actors’ Equity). ♦

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How to Write About the Impact of the Coronavirus in a College Essay

U.S. News & World Report

October 21, 2020, 12:00 AM

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Colleges must examine applicants without the aid of standardized test scores for many — a factor that prompted many schools to go test-optional for now . Even grades, a significant component of a college application, may be hard to interpret with some high schools adopting pass-fail classes last spring due to the pandemic. Major college admissions factors are suddenly skewed.

“I can’t help but think other (admissions) factors are going to matter more,” says Ethan Sawyer, founder of the College Essay Guy, a website that offers free and paid essay-writing resources.

[ Read: How to Write a College Essay. ]

But before writing a college essay focused on the coronavirus, students should explore whether it’s the best topic for them.

Writing About COVID-19 for a College Application

“For some young people, the pandemic took away what they envisioned as their senior year,” says Robert Alexander, dean of admissions, financial aid and enrollment management at the University of Rochester in New York. “Maybe that’s a spot on a varsity athletic team or the lead role in the fall play. And it’s OK for them to mourn what should have been and what they feel like they lost, but more important is how are they making the most of the opportunities they do have?”

That question, Alexander says, is what colleges want answered if students choose to address COVID-19 in their college essay.

But the question of whether a student should write about the coronavirus is tricky. The answer depends largely on the student.

“In general, I don’t think students should write about COVID-19 in their main personal statement for their application,” Robin Miller, master college admissions counselor at IvyWise, a college counseling company, wrote in an email.

“Certainly, there may be exceptions to this based on a student’s individual experience, but since the personal essay is the main place in the application where the student can really allow their voice to be heard and share insight into who they are as an individual, there are likely many other topics they can choose to write about that are more distinctive and unique than COVID-19,” Miller says.

[ Read: What Colleges Look for: 6 Ways to Stand Out. ]

Opinions among admissions experts vary on whether to write about the likely popular topic of the pandemic.

“If your essay communicates something positive, unique, and compelling about you in an interesting and eloquent way, go for it,” Carolyn Pippen, principal college admissions counselor at IvyWise, wrote in an email. She adds that students shouldn’t be dissuaded from writing about a topic merely because it’s common, noting that “topics are bound to repeat, no matter how hard we try to avoid it.”

Above all, she urges honesty.

“If your experience within the context of the pandemic has been truly unique, then write about that experience, and the standing out will take care of itself,” Pippen says. “If your experience has been generally the same as most other students in your context, then trying to find a unique angle can easily cross the line into exploiting a tragedy, or at least appearing as though you have.”

But focusing entirely on the pandemic can limit a student to a single story and narrow who they are in an application, Sawyer says. “There are so many wonderful possibilities for what you can say about yourself outside of your experience within the pandemic.”

That doesn’t mean the pandemic experience has to be ignored if applicants feel the need to write about it.

Writing About Coronavirus in Main and Supplemental Essays

Students can choose to write a full-length college essay on the coronavirus or summarize their experience in a shorter form.

[ Read: The Common App: Everything You Need to Know. ]

“That’s not a trick question, and there’s no right or wrong answer,” Alexander says. Colleges want to know, he adds, how students navigated the pandemic, how they prioritized their time, what responsibilities they took on and what they learned along the way.

If students can distill all of the above information into 250 words, there’s likely no need to write about it in a full-length college essay, experts say. And applicants whose lives were not heavily altered by the pandemic may even choose to skip the optional COVID-19 question.

“This space is best used to discuss hardship and/or significant challenges that the student and/or the student’s family experienced as a result of COVID-19 and how they have responded to those difficulties,” Miller notes. Using the section to acknowledge a lack of impact, she adds, “could be perceived as trite and lacking insight, despite the good intentions of the applicant.”

To guard against this lack of awareness, Sawyer encourages students to tap someone they trust to review their writing , whether it’s the 250-word Common App response or the full-length essay.

“My advice for an essay about COVID-19 is the same as my advice about an essay for any topic — and that is, don’t write what you think we want to read or hear,” Alexander says. “Write what really changed you and that story that now is yours and yours alone to tell.”

Sawyer urges students to ask themselves, “What’s the sentence that only I can write?” He also encourages students to remember that the pandemic is only a chapter of their lives and not the whole book.

Miller, who cautions against writing a full-length essay on the coronavirus, says that if students choose to do so they should have a conversation with their high school counselor about whether that’s the right move. And if students choose to proceed with COVID-19 as a topic, she says they need to be clear, detailed and insightful about what they learned and how they adapted along the way.

“Approaching the essay in this manner will provide important balance while demonstrating personal growth and vulnerability,” Miller says.

Pippen encourages students to remember that they are in an unprecedented time for college admissions.

“It is important to keep in mind with all of these (admission) factors that no colleges have ever had to consider them this way in the selection process, if at all,” Pippen says. “They have had very little time to calibrate their evaluations of different application components within their offices, let alone across institutions. This means that colleges will all be handling the admissions process a little bit differently, and their approaches may even evolve over the course of the admissions cycle.”

Searching for a college? Get our complete rankings of Best Colleges.

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How to Write About the Impact of the Coronavirus in a College Essay

Colleges must examine applicants without the aid of standardized test scores for many -- a factor that prompted many schools to go test-optional for now . Even grades, a significant component of a college application, may be hard to interpret with some high schools adopting pass-fail classes last spring due to the pandemic. Major college admissions factors are suddenly skewed.

"I can't help but think other (admissions) factors are going to matter more," says Ethan Sawyer, founder of the College Essay Guy, a website that offers free and paid essay-writing resources.

[ Read: How to Write a College Essay. ]

But before writing a college essay focused on the coronavirus, students should explore whether it's the best topic for them.

Writing About COVID-19 for a College Application

That question, Alexander says, is what colleges want answered if students choose to address COVID-19 in their college essay.

But the question of whether a student should write about the coronavirus is tricky. The answer depends largely on the student.

[ Read: What Colleges Look for: 6 Ways to Stand Out. ]

Opinions among admissions experts vary on whether to write about the likely popular topic of the pandemic.

Above all, she urges honesty.

That doesn't mean the pandemic experience has to be ignored if applicants feel the need to write about it.

Writing About Coronavirus in Main and Supplemental Essays

Students can choose to write a full-length college essay on the coronavirus or summarize their experience in a shorter form.

[ Read: The Common App: Everything You Need to Know. ]

To guard against this lack of awareness, Sawyer encourages students to tap someone they trust to review their writing , whether it's the 250-word Common App response or the full-length essay.

"My advice for an essay about COVID-19 is the same as my advice about an essay for any topic -- and that is, don't write what you think we want to read or hear," Alexander says. "Write what really changed you and that story that now is yours and yours alone to tell."

"Approaching the essay in this manner will provide important balance while demonstrating personal growth and vulnerability," Miller says.

Pippen encourages students to remember that they are in an unprecedented time for college admissions.

Searching for a college? Get our complete rankings of Best Colleges.

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I am not invincible: My COVID-19 story

David J. Vega Mar 26, 2020

Yes, I tested positive for COVID-19. I fell victim to this virus: a nasty, lingering virus that gave me the worst symptoms I’ve experienced to this day that I wouldn’t wish upon anyone. My story is to warn you that this is not the common cold or a regular flu. This virus is serious.

My name is David, and I am an otherwise healthy 27-year-old male with no past medical history. I am a fourth-year medical student, who will soon be a doctor starting residency in June. I am a health freak, I work out five to six times a week, I have a six-pack on a good day, and I completely took my health for granted.

I thought I was INVINCIBLE—I thought I was immune to this coronavirus because I am healthy and young. But I was wrong.

In early March, reports of novel transmission of the coronavirus were just starting to appear in the United States. I had heard about the nursing home in Seattle, the synagogue in New Rochelle, New York. It was a precarious situation, but community transmission of the virus was not quite so widespread.

‘Sure, I’ll wash my hands,’ ‘I’ll social distance after that party,’ I thought. Looking back, there were too many opportunities for me to have caught this virus. I did not take my health seriously. I figured I could avoid the virus, but in the off-chance I were to get it, it would be like a mild flu or a bad cold. I flew home from a two-month global medicine elective in Africa, ventured on long flights home and around lots of people at Nairobi and JFK airport. I went to a beach party during my week stay in Florida and saw lots of friends before heading back to Indiana to finish up my last semester of medical school. I was not careful. I did not take the necessary precautions. I did not think it could happen to me.

The fact of the matter is – you NEVER know.

A day after arriving in Indiana, symptoms started to kick in. On Thursday, March 12, I woke up with fever, chills, fatigue, generalized muscle aches, and joint pain. Probably just a bad case of the flu, right? No cough, no shortness of breath, no difficulty breathing, no respiratory problems whatsoever. No nausea, no diarrhea. JUST Fever and chills.

Thinking ‘I’ll get over it soon,’ I took some Ibuprofen and Tylenol and stayed in bed most of the day. The next day, I had a routine doctor’s appointment. I was almost turned away because of my symptoms, but I fought to be seen. My oral temperature was 101 degrees Fahrenheit, and I was put in an isolation room for my appointment. My provider, thankfully wearing complete PPE, performed a quick flu test (Influenza A, B, and RSV), which resulted negative that same day. It would later reflex to COVID-19 because of the negative result and I then began the seven-day wait for results.

My symptoms, however, only continued to worsen. The fever was unrelenting. I had no appetite. I had lost about 10 pounds. I loaded up on my daily multivitamins and Emergen-C; I continued to use Ibuprofen and Tylenol every six hours because my body was asking for ANYTHING to take away the misery.

It was not until Day 6 that I decided to drop the Ibuprofen after reading some expert opinions that NSAIDs may actually alter the immune response against the virus. Admittedly, I did feel WAY better the next day after dropping Ibuprofen. My fever and chills—although still present—felt improved. I continued to use only Tylenol spaced out now in the morning and before bedtime. By Day 7, still feeling chills in the morning, I opted out of using any Tylenol and tried to help my body fight this virus on its own. I attempted a little home bodyweight workout and instantly got lightheaded and felt very nauseous. My body was still desperately fighting this thing.

Day 8: I woke up in the usual sweats from the night before, but felt no fever or chills during the day—I felt much improved. I told myself I would take it easy that day. I was begging and pleading to God for an end to all of this.

After waiting SEVEN ENTIRE DAYS in self-quarantine, I finally received my results: positive for COVID-19, continue self-quarantine for another seven days. Ironically, this arrived an hour before receiving my Match Day residency assignment for emergency medicine at the University of Miami. March 20th was certainly a big day of “results” for me.

By Day 13, I had not used any fever-reducing medicine in six days. For the last few days, my symptoms were mostly confined to nighttime-fatigue, sweats, chills, but by Day 13, all of my symptoms had completely gone away. I reintroduced exercise little by little and can now get through a whole hour workout without getting totally winded.

Why am I telling this story?

Because I encourage you to learn from my mistakes. Because I didn’t listen when numbers started climbing. And now they continue to climb. 55,000-plus patients diagnosed in our country, more than 1,000 people deceased.

Because this virus is REAL. And it SUCKS. To say it was almost two weeks before I was feeling like my normal self. Because I am a “healthy young adult,” but “mild” COVID-19 made my life a living hell.

Because people around the world are DYING from this virus—and doctors must make resource allocation decisions (e.g. in Italy) as to who should get that last ICU bed or that last ventilator because hospitals are at FULL CAPACITY. After returning from a two-month global medicine trip in Africa, I witnessed patients dying on a daily basis due to resource-allocation purposes. And now we are starting to see the same issues in New York City and other densely populated communities in the United States.

We NEED you to STAY HOME, because our health professionals are RUNNING out of masks for themselves and ventilators for patients. The CDC is so desperate that they recently issued new guidelines for health professionals to use bandanas and scarves as substitutes for N95 masks. We NEED you to STAY HOME because these health professionals are sacrificing their lives at the frontline to make sure those affected can stay alive.

I had the two biggest celebrations of my life canceled (Match Day and graduation) for the good of those around me and the rest of the country. Now is NOT the time to go to that party. Now is NOT the time to meet up friends at the bar, to go out to eat, to celebrate your spring break, to go to the beach or the park. I promise you, the celebration can wait.

So please, as a medical professional, as a young adult, I implore for all of you to STAY HOME. I firsthand can now see how this VIRUS takes LIVES. 1 out of 5 people hospitalized from COVID-19 are young adults aged 20-44; I was LUCKY to not be one of them.

As many as 10-20 percent of people show no symptoms, so you may be spreading this virus and injuring those you love without realizing it. We DON’T know who has it and who does not, and we do not have the resources to test everyone, so please STAY HOME. Social-distancing and self-quarantine is just as important for the ELDERLY as for the YOUTH.

We NEED you to do your part to FLATTEN the curve and prevent the growing spread to more and more people every day. If we all do our part, then this self-quarantine can eventually come to an end and we can soon resume what our lives used to be.

My name is David and I am NOT Invincible. And neither are you.

Editor’s note: David Vega is a fourth-year medical student at IU School of Medicine. After traveling overseas and in Florida earlier this month, Vega returned to the IU School of Medicine—Indianapolis campus on March 11, and soon developed symptoms of COVID-19 the following day, March 12. He was tested for the virus on March 13, and received his positive test result on March 20. He informed all individuals with whom he had contact since his return to Indianapolis of his positive test.

"Staying home truly saves lives."

David Vega shares his advice after being diagnosed with COVID-19.

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Read these 12 moving essays about life during coronavirus

Artists, novelists, critics, and essayists are writing the first draft of history.

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The world is grappling with an invisible, deadly enemy, trying to understand how to live with the threat posed by a virus . For some writers, the only way forward is to put pen to paper, trying to conceptualize and document what it feels like to continue living as countries are under lockdown and regular life seems to have ground to a halt.

So as the coronavirus pandemic has stretched around the world, it’s sparked a crop of diary entries and essays that describe how life has changed. Novelists, critics, artists, and journalists have put words to the feelings many are experiencing. The result is a first draft of how we’ll someday remember this time, filled with uncertainty and pain and fear as well as small moments of hope and humanity.

At the New York Review of Books, Ali Bhutto writes that in Karachi, Pakistan, the government-imposed curfew due to the virus is “eerily reminiscent of past military clampdowns”:

Beneath the quiet calm lies a sense that society has been unhinged and that the usual rules no longer apply. Small groups of pedestrians look on from the shadows, like an audience watching a spectacle slowly unfolding. People pause on street corners and in the shade of trees, under the watchful gaze of the paramilitary forces and the police.

His essay concludes with the sobering note that “in the minds of many, Covid-19 is just another life-threatening hazard in a city that stumbles from one crisis to another.”

Writing from Chattanooga, novelist Jamie Quatro documents the mixed ways her neighbors have been responding to the threat, and the frustration of conflicting direction, or no direction at all, from local, state, and federal leaders:

Whiplash, trying to keep up with who’s ordering what. We’re already experiencing enough chaos without this back-and-forth. Why didn’t the federal government issue a nationwide shelter-in-place at the get-go, the way other countries did? What happens when one state’s shelter-in-place ends, while others continue? Do states still under quarantine close their borders? We are still one nation, not fifty individual countries. Right?

Award-winning photojournalist Alessio Mamo, quarantined with his partner Marta in Sicily after she tested positive for the virus, accompanies his photographs in the Guardian of their confinement with a reflection on being confined :

The doctors asked me to take a second test, but again I tested negative. Perhaps I’m immune? The days dragged on in my apartment, in black and white, like my photos. Sometimes we tried to smile, imagining that I was asymptomatic, because I was the virus. Our smiles seemed to bring good news. My mother left hospital, but I won’t be able to see her for weeks. Marta started breathing well again, and so did I. I would have liked to photograph my country in the midst of this emergency, the battles that the doctors wage on the frontline, the hospitals pushed to their limits, Italy on its knees fighting an invisible enemy. That enemy, a day in March, knocked on my door instead.

In the New York Times Magazine, deputy editor Jessica Lustig writes with devastating clarity about her family’s life in Brooklyn while her husband battled the virus, weeks before most people began taking the threat seriously:

At the door of the clinic, we stand looking out at two older women chatting outside the doorway, oblivious. Do I wave them away? Call out that they should get far away, go home, wash their hands, stay inside? Instead we just stand there, awkwardly, until they move on. Only then do we step outside to begin the long three-block walk home. I point out the early magnolia, the forsythia. T says he is cold. The untrimmed hairs on his neck, under his beard, are white. The few people walking past us on the sidewalk don’t know that we are visitors from the future. A vision, a premonition, a walking visitation. This will be them: Either T, in the mask, or — if they’re lucky — me, tending to him.

Essayist Leslie Jamison writes in the New York Review of Books about being shut away alone in her New York City apartment with her 2-year-old daughter since she became sick:

The virus. Its sinewy, intimate name. What does it feel like in my body today? Shivering under blankets. A hot itch behind the eyes. Three sweatshirts in the middle of the day. My daughter trying to pull another blanket over my body with her tiny arms. An ache in the muscles that somehow makes it hard to lie still. This loss of taste has become a kind of sensory quarantine. It’s as if the quarantine keeps inching closer and closer to my insides. First I lost the touch of other bodies; then I lost the air; now I’ve lost the taste of bananas. Nothing about any of these losses is particularly unique. I’ve made a schedule so I won’t go insane with the toddler. Five days ago, I wrote Walk/Adventure! on it, next to a cut-out illustration of a tiger—as if we’d see tigers on our walks. It was good to keep possibility alive.

At Literary Hub, novelist Heidi Pitlor writes about the elastic nature of time during her family’s quarantine in Massachusetts:

During a shutdown, the things that mark our days—commuting to work, sending our kids to school, having a drink with friends—vanish and time takes on a flat, seamless quality. Without some self-imposed structure, it’s easy to feel a little untethered. A friend recently posted on Facebook: “For those who have lost track, today is Blursday the fortyteenth of Maprilay.” ... Giving shape to time is especially important now, when the future is so shapeless. We do not know whether the virus will continue to rage for weeks or months or, lord help us, on and off for years. We do not know when we will feel safe again. And so many of us, minus those who are gifted at compartmentalization or denial, remain largely captive to fear. We may stay this way if we do not create at least the illusion of movement in our lives, our long days spent with ourselves or partners or families.

Novelist Lauren Groff writes at the New York Review of Books about trying to escape the prison of her fears while sequestered at home in Gainesville, Florida:

Some people have imaginations sparked only by what they can see; I blame this blinkered empiricism for the parks overwhelmed with people, the bars, until a few nights ago, thickly thronged. My imagination is the opposite. I fear everything invisible to me. From the enclosure of my house, I am afraid of the suffering that isn’t present before me, the people running out of money and food or drowning in the fluid in their lungs, the deaths of health-care workers now growing ill while performing their duties. I fear the federal government, which the right wing has so—intentionally—weakened that not only is it insufficient to help its people, it is actively standing in help’s way. I fear we won’t sufficiently punish the right. I fear leaving the house and spreading the disease. I fear what this time of fear is doing to my children, their imaginations, and their souls.

At ArtForum , Berlin-based critic and writer Kristian Vistrup Madsen reflects on martinis, melancholia, and Finnish artist Jaakko Pallasvuo’s 2018 graphic novel Retreat , in which three young people exile themselves in the woods:

In melancholia, the shape of what is ending, and its temporality, is sprawling and incomprehensible. The ambivalence makes it hard to bear. The world of Retreat is rendered in lush pink and purple watercolors, which dissolve into wild and messy abstractions. In apocalypse, the divisions established in genesis bleed back out. My own Corona-retreat is similarly soft, color-field like, each day a blurred succession of quarantinis, YouTube–yoga, and televized press conferences. As restrictions mount, so does abstraction. For now, I’m still rooting for love to save the world.

At the Paris Review , Matt Levin writes about reading Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves during quarantine:

A retreat, a quarantine, a sickness—they simultaneously distort and clarify, curtail and expand. It is an ideal state in which to read literature with a reputation for difficulty and inaccessibility, those hermetic books shorn of the handholds of conventional plot or characterization or description. A novel like Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is perfect for the state of interiority induced by quarantine—a story of three men and three women, meeting after the death of a mutual friend, told entirely in the overlapping internal monologues of the six, interspersed only with sections of pure, achingly beautiful descriptions of the natural world, a day’s procession and recession of light and waves. The novel is, in my mind’s eye, a perfectly spherical object. It is translucent and shimmering and infinitely fragile, prone to shatter at the slightest disturbance. It is not a book that can be read in snatches on the subway—it demands total absorption. Though it revels in a stark emotional nakedness, the book remains aloof, remote in its own deep self-absorption.

In an essay for the Financial Times, novelist Arundhati Roy writes with anger about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s anemic response to the threat, but also offers a glimmer of hope for the future:

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

From Boston, Nora Caplan-Bricker writes in The Point about the strange contraction of space under quarantine, in which a friend in Beirut is as close as the one around the corner in the same city:

It’s a nice illusion—nice to feel like we’re in it together, even if my real world has shrunk to one person, my husband, who sits with his laptop in the other room. It’s nice in the same way as reading those essays that reframe social distancing as solidarity. “We must begin to see the negative space as clearly as the positive, to know what we don’t do is also brilliant and full of love,” the poet Anne Boyer wrote on March 10th, the day that Massachusetts declared a state of emergency. If you squint, you could almost make sense of this quarantine as an effort to flatten, along with the curve, the distinctions we make between our bonds with others. Right now, I care for my neighbor in the same way I demonstrate love for my mother: in all instances, I stay away. And in moments this month, I have loved strangers with an intensity that is new to me. On March 14th, the Saturday night after the end of life as we knew it, I went out with my dog and found the street silent: no lines for restaurants, no children on bicycles, no couples strolling with little cups of ice cream. It had taken the combined will of thousands of people to deliver such a sudden and complete emptiness. I felt so grateful, and so bereft.

And on his own website, musician and artist David Byrne writes about rediscovering the value of working for collective good , saying that “what is happening now is an opportunity to learn how to change our behavior”:

In emergencies, citizens can suddenly cooperate and collaborate. Change can happen. We’re going to need to work together as the effects of climate change ramp up. In order for capitalism to survive in any form, we will have to be a little more socialist. Here is an opportunity for us to see things differently — to see that we really are all connected — and adjust our behavior accordingly. Are we willing to do this? Is this moment an opportunity to see how truly interdependent we all are? To live in a world that is different and better than the one we live in now? We might be too far down the road to test every asymptomatic person, but a change in our mindsets, in how we view our neighbors, could lay the groundwork for the collective action we’ll need to deal with other global crises. The time to see how connected we all are is now.

The portrait these writers paint of a world under quarantine is multifaceted. Our worlds have contracted to the confines of our homes, and yet in some ways we’re more connected than ever to one another. We feel fear and boredom, anger and gratitude, frustration and strange peace. Uncertainty drives us to find metaphors and images that will let us wrap our minds around what is happening.

Yet there’s no single “what” that is happening. Everyone is contending with the pandemic and its effects from different places and in different ways. Reading others’ experiences — even the most frightening ones — can help alleviate the loneliness and dread, a little, and remind us that what we’re going through is both unique and shared by all.

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College, interrupted: The pandemic turned my family into my best friends

The author shares a snapshot from the best 20th birthday party.

For many Americans, the vast majority of time spent with parents occurs before college or whenever they leave the nest. Blogger Donn Felker even quantified it, estimating that out of our total time spent with them, 90% happens before age 18.

It’s one of those statistics you can’t fully appreciate until that time has passed. It really hit me three years ago, when I found myself alone in a college dorm room on a Friday night. My friends were busy, so I watched “The Holiday,” but all I wanted was to have a movie night with my mom. We both would probably fall asleep on the couch and miss the ending. Yet, we would be together.

So when the coronavirus pandemic took hold in the U.S. in March 2020, I got an unexpected yet welcomed extension of life at home, spending every day with my family for six months. It was a chance, as an adult, to get to know my parents and two younger brothers better while falling back into the easy routines of childhood — time I wouldn’t trade for any college experience now.

Our last family trip before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic was seeing the Clemson Tigers beat the Ohio State Buckeyes on Dec. 28, 2019, at the Fiesta Bowl.

College, interrupted

Back in middle and high school, I took quiet Friday nights for granted. It wasn’t until 2018 and my first year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that I really yearned for those simple days when I followed a routine that my parents guided me through: awake by 6 a.m. for school, a ride to dance practice, dinner on the table and then an episode of “Jeopardy!” or a rerun of “The Office” before bed.

We took one last selfie before I moved into my freshman dorm room.

In college, I had to set my own routines. And by sophomore year, I finally found my groove: connecting with people to pass my days with, editing at my college newspaper and starting to focus on writing as a career. I finally had a full, packed schedule.

By January 2020, I spent every day in The Daily Tar Heel newsroom. And we started seeing headlines about a spreading virus across the world. I remember thinking that with so few cases in the United States, maybe we’d get two weeks off school, max. Surely, everything would be fine.

Then spring break rolled around, and I had planned the rest of my year to be just fun . I had a relaxing beach trip with two of my best friends to Hilton Head, South Carolina, my formal was set for later that month — I still needed a dress, but I was confident I’d find something — then, I had our end-of-year banquet for the paper. Celebrations abounded.

But on the drive to Hilton Head, my friend Morgan checked her email. Our university extended spring break by another week before starting fully remote instruction due to COVID-19, which had just hit North Carolina. For the rest of that trip, we went about life as normal. But I started feeling a creeping dread and unease being in a crowd.

When the school announced on March 17 that the residence halls were closin g, I drove back with my roommate to officially move out of our sophomore year dorm. We threw out our dead plants, stuffed bedding and clothes into trash bags and filled her car to the brim. It was messy and haphazard (in my panic, I emptied my entire desk drawer, throwing away everything, including legal documents). She dropped me off, with my poorly packed luggage in tow, and I moved back into my parent’s house in Charlotte, 2 1/2 hours away.

We weren’t alone. The University of Washington became the first major college to cancel in-person classes on March 6, 2020. Twenty days later, 1,102 colleges or universities had followed suit. One professor estimated that the onset of the pandemic impacted more than 14 million college students.

WeWork, family edition

My first college Zoom class proved to be a disaster. I overslept for the 8 a.m. class, joined late and forgot to mute myself. But I couldn’t complain about it to my roommate afterward in the library or tell my sorry tale to friends at lunch. Instead, after logging off, I walked downstairs and my dog was there to greet me, wagging his tail and staring at me expectantly. So, I told him about it.

My house converted into a two-story co-working space. My father, who had always worked from home, saw his office of one turned into an office of five. He’d mute his Zoom and shout from downstairs if my brothers and I talked too loudly. Or he’d stomp into the living room and turn down the TV volume himself.

My mom took calls from our kitchen table. In her days at the office, she was the type of mom who would dress up in pink Chico’s blazers. Now, she took calls in her pajama pants.

My brother Jackson, a junior in high school at the time, had been finishing up a dreaded research project and figuring out how remote AP testing would work. Joshua, in seventh grade, missed playing basketball with his friends at recess and instead, practiced his tuba from his bedroom during virtual band class. (We all quickly learned not to schedule meetings during those times.)

But by 5 p.m., when we finished up our homework and my parents took their last calls of the day, our shared office quickly turned back into our home. My brothers and I set up our old Nintendo Wii and started playing Mario Kart and Wii Sports Tennis again. We took our dog on a walk at 6 p.m. every night, letting us watch the sunset as we chatted with passing neighbors from a 10-foot distance. Then we would watch a few episodes of a show together. First, it was “Outer Banks,” then Netflix’s “Tiger King.”

"The greatest privilege of all was realizing that they made for not only a loving family but the greatest of friends."

All in all, our routines were simple. A few times a week after our walk, we’d play doubles tennis (mind you, only our mom had ever really played before) in a rotation to make sure all five of us were included. We made tacos every Tuesday, and it became part of how I kept track of the weeks. I downloaded TikTok for the first time and started sending the funniest videos to my brothers, texting them from just one room over.

From family ... to friends

I’m especially grateful for this special time with my brothers. As the eldest sibling, I have always said that one of my greatest privileges is watching them turn into “real people.” Of course, they were always real, live human beings, but at a certain point, you watch them become mini-contributing members of society. They have their own favorite songs, go-to jokes and sarcastic inflections — topics they could talk about for hours. Jackson and I shared an Apple Music account and discovered that our only intersection in music preferences was the song “Circles” by Post Malone. It was the most-played song for us in 2020 by a long shot.

Rather than just pesky creatures following you around, pushing your buttons and aiming to make your life as difficult as it can be, younger siblings eventually turn into people you can confide in — and want to hang out with.

In quarantine, I got to watch my two younger brothers become "real people."

And over the summer of 2020, I was lucky enough to solidify those friendships.

We talked to each other all the time. Sure, I FaceTimed my friends from college, but in the day to day, the people who kept me from being lonely was my family. To get through something as life-altering as a pandemic, we were forced to lean on each other.

And the greatest privilege of all was realizing that they made for not only a loving family but the greatest of friends.

My mom can actively listen to a story while juggling any responsibility. My dad’s dinner table stand-up comedy became my favorite entertainment, and just his laugh alone could make it hard to breathe. Jackson is fiercely loyal, and even if he acted like he didn’t care, he enjoyed knowing about our lives and the people in it. And Joshua’s ability to quote obscure sitcom lines will serve as an impressive party trick one day.

So, when I turned 20 later that June, surrounded by my family, it was the best party I’ve ever had.

I moved into m y first college apartment six months later to start my junior year online. Now, I’m finishing my senior year. Jackson is a freshman in college and Joshua started high school. My family has a texting group chat that is active daily, even if it’s just my dad sharing his Wordle score.

I think we just got so used to talking to each other every single day that it would be impossible for us to stop now.

Maddie Ellis is a weekend editor at TODAY Digital.

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Int J Environ Res Public Health

First-Year College Student Life Experiences during COVID-19 in South Korea

Mikyung jun.

1 Department of Home Economics Education, College of Education, Dongguk University, Seoul 04620, Korea; ude.kuggnod@nujkm

2 Dharma College, Dongguk University, Seoul 04620, Korea

Taeeun Shim

3 Competency Development Center, Dongguk University, Seoul 04620, Korea; ten.liamnah@3952mihs

Associated Data

Data from the study are available upon request.

The purpose of this study is to examine the first-year students’ experience in college during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide a better understanding of their daily life. Using inductive content analysis, this study examined the characteristics and experiences of students who started college during the COVID-19 period in South Korea. We analyzed 623 pieces of content, using data presented by a total of 81 study subjects. From this analysis, we derived 22 primary keywords, which we divided into eight categories, and then reclassified into three general topics: self-awareness (i.e., self-reflection), activities (i.e., engagement in activities), and resources (i.e., creating relationships or producing results). The results showed that, although first-year college students experienced difficulties in adapting to the COVID-19 situation, they tried to cope with them. Our findings shed light on the experiences of college students who experienced psychological problems during the COVID-19 pandemic and overcame related challenges.

1. Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic is predicted to eventually transition into an endemic situation [ 1 ]. As in other countries, the so-called “Corona semester” and the general chaos of COVID-19 have caused mental health difficulties for students, faculty, and staff in South Korea’s schools [ 2 ]. However, this was not the first time an infectious disease produced such chaos in South Korea. Indeed, most universities initiated an early school vacation during the spread of MERS, which also caused confusion in academic management and led to the suspension of clinical training [ 3 ].

While COVID-19 proved more serious and long-lasting than these previous experiences, the public responses have progressed rationally and efficiently. The new normal emerged as people turned the crisis into an opportunity. In particular, schools adapted surprisingly quickly to new education methods [ 4 ]. COVID-19 forced all teachers to implement online lectures, which most had previously avoided, leading to changes in educational methods [ 5 ]. The pandemic also forced teachers and learners to adopt methods that promoted much greater convenience, safety, and efficiency in certain areas. This became a standard, a “new normal”, in the education field. During the Corona semester, professors videotaped lessons that students could listen to as many times as they wanted. In addition, teachers and students carried out video discussions and presentations, conducted virtual experiments, and took examinations online. Students also experienced the convenience of technology [ 6 , 7 , 8 ]. After COVID-19, these experiences will provide both teachers and learners new educational options.

This study investigates the college life experiences of students, especially first-year students, who went through the “Corona semester”. In South Korea, the college entrance rate was 70.4% in 2020; 72.5% of high school graduates entered college, which is a higher-level school [ 9 ]. In general, South Korean high school students enter college at the age of 19 years; females spend four years in college and male students spend six-to-seven years, because of mandatory military service in their early adulthood. We focused on first-year college students in the COVID-19 context for the following three reasons.

To begin with, first-year college students have finished their adolescence. Positioned in the early developmental stage of adulthood, self-growth is one of the essential developmental tasks they face [ 10 ]. During this transitional period, when changes and various competitions occur, students must respond appropriately to the demands of college life, in order to succeed in their studies, interpersonal relationships, and emotional development [ 11 ]. Many students enter college without preparing for their studies [ 12 ], and 4 out of 100 first-year students suffer from suicidal impulses in South Korea, demonstrating the difficulty of adapting to this new environment [ 13 ].

In 2020, individuals entering universities as first-year college students had to adapt to university environments undergoing an unprecedented reorganization due to COVID-19. This coincided with a time of transition in their lifecycles. The first-year college students of 2020 experienced the triple distress of adapting to the life transition from adolescence to early adulthood, to the transition from high school to college, and to the unprecedented university environment. This study investigates their experiences in this context and the meaning they gave to these experiences.

Second, the entrance exam culture in South Korea means that students entering college have already succeeded, despite very serious competition. Even given the present population situation, where the ultra-low birth rate means that university enrollment quotas exceed the number of high school students, admission to a “good” university is still vital to Koreans [ 14 ]. On the day of the government-sponsored college scholastic ability test, office workers start later in the day to help reduce the traffic congestion experienced by examinees, and the stock market opens late. In addition, when the English listening test is in progress, flights near more than 1000 examination sites across the country are completely controlled [ 15 ]. These measures are meant to ensure the convenience and fairness of the entrance exam environment. As such, entrance into university represents liberation from the evaluation of high school life records, which, from the students’ perspective, determine their success or failure on university entrance exams and in private education, such as the programs provided by private educational institutes and private after-school tutoring.

Teachers and parents mention “the romance of the campus” as one means of encouraging students and children to endure the entrance exam hell. High school students make lists of things they can enjoy in college life. For example, they identify flexible university timetables, OT (Orientation) and MT (Membership Training) in March, festivals in May, long summer and winter vacations, and shopping with the money they had earned from the part-time jobs they held while enduring the difficulties of high school life. Thus, the first year of college typically functions as a sort of compensation for the first-year students who survive the challenging entrance exam. However, the COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible for students to enjoy the romance of the campus, thereby aggravating their psychological difficulties. According to Hawley et al. [ 16 ], college students in seven countries—the USA, the Netherlands, Ireland, South Korea, China, Malaysia, and Taiwan—worry about education, safety, mental health, employment stability/finances, uncertainty about the future, and relationships in the COVID-19 era. This study concretely examined the meanings the first-year college of students of 2020 gave to their college lives, which are developing in completely different ways than they expected while preparing for the entrance exams.

Third, this study recognizes that people in society regard the students who started college in 2020 as the most unfortunate students in the world because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The public believes that these students did not receive proper congratulations for their high school graduation or college entrance because they did not participate in normal high school graduation or university entrance ceremonies. Indeed, the term “the cursed class of 2020” has become a common means of expressing pity for the first-year college students of 2020 [ 17 ]. This raises an important question: how have the members of “the cursed class of 2020” accepted their fate as first-year college students of 2020?

Universities provide students time and space to accumulate various experiences, observe new phenomena, and participate in new things that shape their lives. The first-year college students of 2020 faced the vital task of adapting to college life during the COVID-19 pandemic while transitioning to early adulthood. The process of adjusting to college life involves “active exchanges” between students and the university environment [ 18 ]. First-year students must adapt to pursuing a major course of study while building new interpersonal relationships with professors, friends, seniors, juniors, etc. [ 19 ]. The psychological characteristics of first-year students, related to their adaptation to college life, are intertwined with their ego identities, self-esteem, self-efficacy, and self-leadership. Failure to adapt effectively can produce destructive and painful results [ 1 ].

Therefore, this study examines the college life experiences of first-year college students transitioning to early adulthood in the unprecedented university environment caused by COVID-19 in 2020. To achieve our aims, we seek to answer the following research questions:

How have first-year college students experienced the COVID-19 period?
What meanings have first-year college students given to their life experiences during the COVID-19 period?

2. Materials and Methods

The data collection of this study was conducted in two stages. First, an open-ended questionnaire, related to the research topic, was analyzed to investigate their college life experiences during COVID-19. A focus group interview was then conducted to pursue in-depth content of their daily life. This process makes it possible to understand their life in college, broadly and deeply.

First, this study analyzed the college life experiences of students taking liberal arts courses. We used an open-ended questionnaire based on inductive content analysis, a qualitative research method. Researchers generally apply inductive content analysis to unstructured sentences to group data through a process that includes open coding, category creation, and abstraction. Researchers code the data, focusing on the grouped sentences as concepts, categories, or topics. Then, they combine the codes with other open codes that include similar content, thereby combining subordinate concepts, categories, and themes. The coding outcomes become the basis for reporting the results of the inductive content analysis [ 20 ]. This method has the advantage of enabling a clear interpretation of first-year college students’ experiences, without impairing researchers’ intentions [ 21 ].

Therefore, we used inductive content analysis to organize student interview data for open coding in this study and created topic categories to topicalize and abstract freshmen students’ college life experiences [ 22 ].

Second, focus group interviews were conducted. To select the participants, an e-mail was sent to first-year students taking liberal arts courses to ask if they were willing to participate in the study, and among the students who expressed their intention to participate, five first-year students studying in various departments were selected.

2.1. Study Subjects

2.1.1. documented materials.

This study examined how first-year college students experienced college life during the COVID-19 period. We asked 91 first-year students taking liberal arts courses to fill out an open-ended questionnaire focusing on the general question: “How was your college life experience during the last one year?” After excluding 10 international students from our survey, due to their culturally biased experiences, we analyzed a total of 81 questionnaires. The study included 32 males and 49 females. The majors of the 81 respondents were as follows:

8 in English
7 in business
7 in physical semiconductors
5 in Chinese
5 in history education
5 in Japanese
5 in mathematics education
4 in geography education
3 in accounting
3 in Korean language education
3 in Korean literature and creative writing
3 in mathematics
3 in public administration
2 in history
2 in statistics
1 in chemistry
1 in education
1 in home economics
1 in media communication
1 in physical education

2.1.2. Focus Group Interview (FGI)

To further investigate this study’s topic using the collected data, we conducted focus group interview (FGI) with five first-year college students from different colleges: business, humanities, life science and biotechnology, law, and natural sciences. We used WebEx for the interviews. We explained the study’s purpose to the subjects and obtained their informed consent. We compensated each interviewee 20,000 KRW for their participation. The interviews included in-depth questions, such as: “What experiences did you have as a first-year college student of 2020?” and “What changes did you feel while you were taking classes during the first and second semesters?” We recorded and transcribed the content of the student interviews.

2.2. Study Procedure

2.2.1. collection and analysis of documented materials.

This study collected documented materials on the college life experiences of 81 first-year students for the year 2020. The researchers separately read the responses of 81 first-year college students several times to become familiar with the answers, extracting and organizing sentences related to their experiences as first-years. They subsequently re-read the materials and tried to find important meanings as themes, trying to understand the participants’ experience in college during the COVID pandemic. The researchers repeatedly read the written materials and wrote as many titles as necessary to explain all their dimensions [ 23 , 24 , 25 ]. Then, they collected their titles, avoiding overlapped meanings. They identified and refined the titles, resulting in 623 open codes.

In this stage, researchers freely created titles, and three researchers held separate meetings to consider what criteria they should use to classify the transcribed materials, focusing on the 623 codes. In these meetings, the two researchers classified the materials by grouping similar concepts, extracting 22 keywords for the groupings, through concrete discussion of what keywords to create. They then grouped the 22 materials by combining categories with similar or different purposes into broader, higher-order categories to reduce their number [ 23 , 26 , 27 ]. In this process, when the researchers disagreed, they repeatedly read the data, focusing on what the participants intended and revised the categorization repeatedly. If an agreement was still not made, the third researcher gave an opinion for coding to increase the validity. Finally, they grouped the 22 categories, in order to explain the subjects’ college life experiences, improve understanding, and create knowledge regarding the subject.

After that, we categorized the 22 open-ended extracted words into eight content areas. First, we grouped some words into “College life without any compass”, focusing on content related to “Giving up on the college life they envisioned”, “Feeling helpless”, “Feeling lost”, “Feeling overwhelmed”, and “Feeling limited”. Second, we grouped some words into “Interaction (network)”, focusing on content related to “Interacting with classmates”, “Interacting with senior classmates”, and “Making new relationships in school”. Third, we categorized some words into “Stagnation”, focusing on content related to “Feeling like it is an extension of high school”, “Feeling bored with the repetitive lifestyle”, and “Staying at home all the time”. Fourth, we included a category for “Extracurricular activities” focusing on content related to “Engaging in club activities”, “Working at a part-time job”, and “Being involved in student council” during college life. Fifth, we sorted some words into “Self-reflection”, focusing on content related to positive and negative introspective insights. Sixth, we combined some words into “Curriculum activities”, focusing on content related to “Taking online courses” and “Taking courses” for college classes. Seventh, we placed some words in a “Competency” category, focusing on content related to “Feeling a sense of accomplishment” and “Having an increased awareness of better time management”. Finally, in the eighth category, we grouped words into “Adaptation”, focusing on content related to “Setting new goals” and “Adjusting to the given situation”.

In the concluding topic extraction stage, we identified the final categories as self-awareness (i.e., insight into oneself), activities to intervene in activities, and drawing on resources to establish relationships or produce results. We then calculated the frequencies and percentages of the 623 pieces of material, used in the content analysis that we referred to, as we interpreted the study findings.

2.2.2. FGI Data Analysis

We recorded, transcribed, and analyzed the content of the interview with five first-year college students and described the results to concretize meanings by connecting the content with the analytic results. In other words, we used the results to provide in-depth explanations of the meanings of individual topic classifications.

3.1. Topic Classification

We obtained 623 pieces of content about life experiences from first-year college students and classified them into 22 primary topics, categorized these detailed areas into eight secondary topics and further classified these secondary topics into superordinate concepts, such as self-awareness (i.e., self-reflection) (49.76%), engagement in activities (i.e., to engage in activities) (33.07%), and resources (making relationships or achieving results) (17.17%). All the topic classification about life experience from first-year college students is displayed in Table 1 .

Topic classification.

3.2. Topic Findings

3.2.1. self-awareness.

Our analysis of first-year college student life experiences identified the topic “life without any compass” in 26.16% of the content. “Life without any compass” refers to frustrating experiences due to the cancellation of MT, clubs, festivals, etc., that first-year college students expected to be part of college life. It also refers to the sense of helplessness that resulted from the limitations on external activities, the confusion stemming from the lack of guidelines for college life, and feeling overwhelmed by the responsibility of simultaneously undertaking college life and abiding by activity restrictions while desiring to engage. This content shows that students experienced frustration in unexpected situations. For example, student “A” (who participated in the interview) said:

“If I go to school, I can discuss everything with my classmates and meet seniors for help, but since I could not go to school, I encountered difficulties in the process of registering for courses and attending lectures, the process of performing tasks, and the process of preparing for employment”.

We found the topic of “self-reflection” in 11.88% of the content. This topic encompassed, feeling grateful while engaging in self-reflection, regarding increased personal time and positive self-perceptions, derived through the process of valuing even small things. It also included content related to introspection, regarding wasting time and not trying to grow. We found that first-year college students had time to reflect on themselves, whether positively or negatively, during a period that became relatively long. For instance, student “B” said:

“I think I have only vaguely thought about my future and never seriously thought about it, but because I have had a lot of time to worry and because I looked for a lot of things I could do at home because of the non-face-to-face classes, I had opportunities to seriously think about the future regarding how to live and what values I should pursue in my life”.

The topic “adaptation” occurred in 11.72% of the content. This topic encompassed content related to making and practically carrying out plans to adapt to, accept, and succeed in the new, unexpected environment. Through trial and error, first-year college students resolved to spend their time meaningfully, no matter what settings they encountered in the future. In addition, they appeared to try to identify what they could do and then took action to do it in an environment that they could not change. For example, student “C” said:

“Since non-face-to-face classes are required, and situations, where social distancing is required have persisted because of Corona, I think I limited what I can do by myself. Therefore, I thought I was limited in doing meaningful things. Thus, I tried to participate in more varied activities online”.

In addition, student “D” said:

“I was embarrassed very much at first because my college life was so much different from what I had expected, but later I tried to engage in many meaningful activities that I could do at home while practicing social distancing. I challenged myself to take the TOEIC test, and I tried to study for various certificates”.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, these first-year college students experienced disappointment because this period did not align with their life expectations; they sometimes felt that they had wasted their time. However, we found that the extra free time they received enabled them to gain insight into themselves and that they tried to figure out what they could do to adapt to the pandemic environment. The contents of self-awareness for reflection are displayed in Table 2 .

Self-awareness for reflection (n = 310) (49.76%).

3.2.2. Activities

The topic “stagnation” appeared in 4.65% of the content. Stagnation refers to the feeling of suffocation some first-year college students felt because college life did not differ significantly from high school life and because non-face-to-face classes occupied most of their time. They experienced boredom because of the repetitiveness of their daily patterns. Respondents described being unable to have new experiences, due to the increased time at home. However, they also positively characterized the experience, pointing out that the increased interactions and conversations fostered greater intimacy between family members. For example, student “E” said:

“My grandmother moved to Busan and lives there. But when I was in my third year of high school last year, my grandmother came to Seoul and took great care of me. Now I can go to Busan and repay her for taking care of me”.

The topic of “extracurricular activities” arose in 8.35% of the content. This topic refers to first-year college students’ experiences of club activities, part-time jobs, and student council activities, within the limits allowed by society. Respondents expressed gratitude for being able to interact with people through such encounters and claimed that the experiences brought them a sense of accomplishment. For example, student “F” said:

“I am currently working to promote student record screening as a notifier under the title “dreamer” for the admissions office. Therefore, I went to school quite a bit. I think meeting people in person has advantages over non-face-to-face meetings”.

We found the topic “curriculum activities” in 20.06% of the content. First-year college students regarded the knowledge acquisition, assignments, exams, and team projects they carried out in college courses as meaningful. They highlighted both the frustration they experienced with the processes of non-face-to-face classes and the advantages of these processes. For example, student “G” said:

“I think that non-face-to-face classes certainly have advantages and disadvantages. In terms of distance, in fact, I have thought that the time to go to school and come back home was quite meaningless. The degree of utilization of time became very high thanks to the current “untact” online classes, and I think this is an advantage of online classes. However, I feel sorry that I have been unable to feel the atmosphere of classes where classmates gather and study together because such an atmosphere is much different from the atmosphere of classes where each student studies alone”.

Respondents claimed that non-face-to-face classes were a source of discomfort in their lives and that they were bored because they spent a lot of time at home. Nevertheless, taking university classes still gave them experiences reminiscent of normal university life. Also, some students experienced advantages in non-face-to-face classes. The contents of engagement in activities are displayed in Table 3 .

Engagement in activities (n = 206) (33.07%).

3.2.3. Resources

The topic “interaction (network)” emerged in 8.51% of the content. This topic refers to the interactions students had with classmates, either offline or online, with seniors at conferences or seminars, and with new people through their schools, including students from different schools. We discovered that first-year college students interacted with others as much as the circumstances permitted and gave positive meanings to such interactions. For instance, student “G” said, “The last year was a year in which meeting with people felt very precious”. Similarly, student “E” said, “I was afraid to register for courses for the first time, but I was happy because my seniors helped me”.

The topic “competency” arose in 8.67% of the content. This topic encompasses content related to the scholarships the first-year college students received because of their dedication to their studies, as well as the personal progress they made by managing themselves and effectively utilizing their extra free time (away from college). For example, student “G” said:

“The best thing about non-face-to-face classes is the aspect of time management. Going to school on the subway in the morning is exhausting, but since I do not have to go to school, there are so many things I can do on my own. Therefore, I spent the last year more worthily meeting other people and doing other meaningful things”.

Ultimately, first-year college students strived to develop within their given environments. They appeared to work hard to grow, despite the circumstantial challenges they faced. The contents of drawing on resources to create relationship or produce results are displayed in Table 4 .

Drawing on resources to create relationships or produce results (n = 107) (17.17%).

4. Discussion

This study examined the college life experience of first-year college students in an environment changed by COVID-19. We classified the content related to their college life experiences into three broad categories: self-reflection, engagement in activities, and use of resources to create relationships or achieve results. The results are discussed in several ways (as follows).

To begin, first-year college students experienced disappointment in their college lives, which differed from what they had expected; they also experienced psychological difficulties adapting. According to a study that analyzed 1000 news articles from December 2019 to October 2020, the most prevalent keywords during this period were “psychology”, “COVID-19”, “blue”, and “anxiety”. The spread of COVID- 19 has had a huge impact not only on daily life but in many areas, such as socioeconomics [ 28 ]. In addition, the uncertainty and unpredictability of COVID-19 have threatened people’s physical and mental health and had especially strong emotional and cognitive impacts [ 29 ]. For example, one study found that about 25% of Chinese university students experienced anxiety symptoms due to the COVID-19 pandemic [ 30 ]. However, these psychological difficulties varied among individuals and across situations.

Yang [ 31 ] demonstrated that first-year college students with below-average ego resilience experienced higher levels of depression. Other studies showed that emotions such as anxiety, restlessness, stuffiness, helplessness, anger, fear, confusion, and distrust (due to COVID-19) were higher than among those with below-average ego resilience than in those with above-average ego resilience and self-efficacy [ 32 , 33 ]. These results support this study, in that we found that college students faced psychological difficulties because of their status as first-year college students. They experienced a sense of loss, due to the lack of the meaningful experiences they had expected from their college lives. They had to go through their experiences helplessly and alone, with insufficient information about college life. In other words, the psychological difficulties experienced by the first-year college students included senses of loss, helplessness, and being overwhelmed, all while encountering the limitations imposed by a new environment without a support system.

Jeon and Yune [ 34 ] found that first-year college students experienced intrinsic difficulties adapting to school. They showed “a sense of burden for freedom”, “their ego faced disappointment due to expectations”, and they experienced “confusing college classes”. That study’s first-year college student respondents, thus, resembled the first-year college students of 2020 of this study, in that they experienced psychological difficulties, but the content of those difficulties was different. Those who were anxious felt stuffy and were depressed; additionally, they were healed by people who positively accepted them, understood them empathically, and treated them truthfully [ 35 , 36 ]. Our results support this research, although it was more difficult for our respondents to adapt to college life in 2020. The first-years we studied had insufficient opportunities to meet those who could relieve their difficulties, due to the burdens of college classes and activity restrictions

Second, first-year college students had opportunities to reflect on themselves during the difficult time of COVID-19. According to Wang, Chen, Lin, and Hong [ 37 ], college students’ self-reflection affects their positive thinking and academic motivation. In addition, research has revealed that self-reflection and insight are positively related to coping ability [ 38 ]. This means that this study’s first-year college students had sufficient time to think about their school lives; in the past, they had always felt that their obligations and responsibilities left them with insufficient time. Although students must fulfill various roles and duties to develop, they also need opportunities to think and reflect independently. Our findings mean that South Korean society has not allowed sufficient space and time for self-reflection during adolescence, and students need enough time for reflection.

Third, although first-year college students experienced restrictions on their activities and had boring college existences that resembled their high school lives during the pandemic, they tried to find and practice potential college activities. They also derived a sense of meaning from taking college classes.

They tried to stay at home to be safe from the risk of infection. This context resembles that of a study conducted by Latiffani and Hasanah [ 39 ], where STMIK Royal Kisaran students canceled all events and stayed at home to abide by physical and social distancing requirements. However, staying at home is a greater barrier to student activity during the first year of college than in other developmental stages. College students are the healthiest they will be in their lives, but restrictions on their radii of action can create high stress [ 40 , 41 ]. In addition, if they avoid going out and stay home all the time out of fear of infection, the state of “self-isolation” they create is more likely to increase their stress than relieve their anxiety [ 42 ].

Students experienced boredom in the restricted environment, but they also expressed satisfaction with their interactions with their family members. Our findings differ in this regard from another study that examined the changes in the daily lives of families during COVID-19 [ 43 ], which indicated that stress factors that had not existed earlier increased in areas such as education and care. These divergent results and the fact that the subjects of this study were in a developmental stage where they could live independently suggests that their perceptions of shared time in daily family life varied according to their family members’ developmental stages. In this study, first-year college students found that the experience of a family bond, in the context of COVID-19, was highly meaningful.

Fourth, first-year college students experienced the negative and positive aspects of online college classes and came to understand the meaning of college classes per se. According to a college student survey concerning the emergency distance learning experience due to COVID-19, Wi-Fi quality and finding a quiet place were important factors in taking classes. This new situation can tire students and lead them to become critical of classes [ 44 ]. According to Barnes [ 12 ], time management, teachers’ low expectations/inconsistency, and continual student needs interfered with academic achievement, and systemic technical problems hindered students’ academic motivation [ 45 ]. This study’s findings, regarding students’ disappointment about non-face-to-face classes, align with those of previous studies. However, the respondents had positive views of the reduced time and cost associated with online classes.

We also found that learning, doing homework, and taking exams in college were fun and meaningful, despite the non-face-to-face settings of the classes. According to Thomas [ 46 ], the first-year college students were more active in online classes than students in other grades. This finding suggests that students who had not experienced face-to-face classes at college adapted to the given environment because they had no basis for comparison. Many of these students expect that even when COVID-19 is over, online non-face-to-face classes will continue, depending on the situation. According to Fung and Lam [ 47 ], the online learning experience of the COVID-19 era could become the new norm in the emerging digital society and make a positive difference. The positive attitudes toward online classes of the freshmen in this study could reflect this move toward digital learning. Kang et al. [ 48 ] developed a service design that could solve the difficulties experienced by first-year college students—a “digital curation calendar”. The calendar could function within a smartphone application, to develop in-school curricular/extracurricular schedules that fit individual students’ schedules and fields of interest. These measures can help new students adapt to school in the post-COVID-19 era.

Fifth, the first-year college students regarded exchanges with people in their limited environments as meaningful. They managed themselves and worked to produce even small results. Social support plays a significant role in the adaptation of college students [ 49 ]. Our study found that students felt joy and experienced a sense of their identities as college students in their interactions with new people, including their peers, seniors, and school personnel.

Although first-year college students experienced psychological difficulties during the COVID-19 pandemic, they endeavored to adapt and develop themselves. They had to adjust their attitudes and behaviors, while accepting the changes resulting from COVID-19. To effectively adapt, they had to engage in challenging new behaviors and use strategies they had not used in the past. This involved a multifaceted coping process in the cognitive, psychological, and technological realms, and it appears that this progression can result in personal growth. Self-growth refers to how one becomes the person he or she is; it involves the ability to realistically understand oneself as one is, accept oneself as one is, and open oneself to others [ 50 ]. In short, the results of this study indicate that while students experienced psychological difficulties during the COVID-19 pandemic, they continued to grow.

5. Limitations

First, although the character and intensity of COVID-19 have varied, depending on one’s family and social context, this study treated “COVID-19” as an exogenous variable.

Second, we did not consider students’ personal characteristics. College life experiences and how students assign meaning to these experiences may vary, depending on the students’ majors. Other variables include whether students crammed to repeat the college entrance exam, whether they had experienced enrollment in other colleges, their gender, etc. We did not consider any of these personal characteristics in our study.

Third, the term “college life” in this study refers to life at universities where classes and extracurricular activities usually occur face-to-face. Therefore, this study does not explain the experiences of first-year college students in universities where online classes predominate, such as the broadcasting university.

Lastly, even though we tried FGI to understand the first-year students’ college life deeply, we still focused on the written questionnaire data in this investigation, as we needed to begin to develop the parameters of further qualitative study.

6. Conclusions

This study examined the experiences of the first-year college students of 2020 and the meanings they assigned to their experiences in a college environment impacted by COVID-19. We analyzed the responses of 81 students to open-ended questionnaires, as well as the results of FGI with five students, and drew the following conclusions. First-year college students experienced a sense of loss because COVID-19 prevented them from having the college lives they expected. They suffered from helplessness, due to a lack of information about college life. However, at the same time, they turned their eyes to the positive aspects of non-face-to-face college classes. They re-evaluated the environment created by COVID-19 by exerting cognitive flexibility, turning it into an opportunity to reflect on themselves. The first-year college students who participated in this study tried to solve their problems with adapting to COVID-19 era college life by converting them into easily manageable issues. When they failed in this strategy, they tried to govern themselves through in-depth self-reflection. In sum, we found that, although first-year college students experienced difficulties in adapting to the COVID-19 situation, the process of coping with these difficulties enabled them to continue growing.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, M.J. and S.L.; methodology, T.S.; software, T.S.; validation, M.J. and S.L.; formal analysis, M.J., S.L. and T.S.; investigation, S.L.; resources, M.J.; data curation, T.S.; writing—original draft preparation, M.J., S.L. and T.S.; writing—review and editing, M.J., S.L. and T.S. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

This research received no external funding.

Institutional Review Board Statement

The study was conducted according to the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki. Because we used an anonymous coding system that make the identification of the person impossible, the authorization of the Institutional Review Board is not necessary.

Informed Consent Statement

When we asked the participants to respond to the survey questionnaire, we explicitly notified them that the purpose of the survey was to proceed with this study. This was followed by a statement to the effect that, by returning the survey questionnaire, they would be deemed to have provided their consents thereto. In addition, informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved for the FGI in the study.

Data Availability Statement

Conflicts of interest.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

The first day of school: how COVID-19 has changed our schools and how we can be public supporters of public education

Assistant professor of social studies education william toledo looks at the changes coming this back-to-school season.

In just a few days, public schools in Reno and across Northern Nevada will reopen their doors to K-12 students. The first day of school is often met with some anxiousness and excitement from teachers, parents, and students, as they consider the challenges and successes they will encounter over the course of the school year.

However, this year brings with it a whole new set of challenges. Since March 2020, the world has struggled to adapt to and deal with COVID-19, a dangerous novel virus still with many unknowns [1] . As researchers continue to study COVID-19, we are finding answers to some of our questions, including an important one as schools open: yes, young people can carry, transmit, and catch COVID-19 [2] . Which leads to an important new question: how does COVID-19 change the profession of teaching?

The first change is the most important one: schools must be physically safe for students’ and educators’ return . Safety in the era of COVID-19 encompasses many factors, an important one being the percentage of positive COVID-19 tests within a county or city. The American Federation of Teachers states that in-person school is safe only when fewer than 5% of coronavirus tests in an area are positive [3] . Beyond this important statistic, NPR reports that there are a variety of factors that should be in place as public schools open: 6-feet of physical distance between desks, small class sizes, consistent, mandatory mask policies for adults and children, frequent replacement of HEPA filters in air ventilation systems, and more. It is key that teachers, parents, and community members examine their district’s reopening plan to determine if a district is ready to open safely. If not, encourage the district to implement strict safety protocols and to only open when COVID-19 numbers are sufficiently low in a community.

Second, teachers face an enormous pedagogical change: educators must meet the needs of in-person and remote (online) learners, sometimes simultaneously . This is a big undertaking for our teachers and educational support staff as districts try to iron out specific plans for what the physical structure of schools will look like. For teachers, there are different steps to take to help with a smooth transition to new blended class formats: using similar or the same curricular materials and sequencing for in-person and remote learners [4] , facilitating student engagement with one another from safe social distances and online [5] , and relying on one another for support and guidance. In a world of “physical distancing,” it is important for teachers to not “socially distance” from one another. Educators should stay connected, and rely on one another for support and collaboration as they adapt to new modes of instruction.

Third, and closely related to each of the first two points: we must all be generous with ourselves and one another as we enter uncharted waters . The fall 2020 return back to school is not going to be “business as usual,” and we must all be flexible. It is quite likely that some schools will open, and close, possibly even more than once. It is also quite likely that mistakes will be made, and that safety protocols need to be amended or adjusted. A key to the success of our public schools during COVID-19 is public support. It is important that parents and community members be flexible and understanding of this shift as educators begin teaching in the midst of what is currently uncharted territory. Additionally, it is key for teachers to be generous with themselves; we are currently asking a great deal of our educators, working in already underfunded public schools. They are now being asked to return to the classroom as frontline workers, and they deserve and have earned public support. We must listen to teachers, and what they tell us about what is or isn’t working as schools reopen, and adjust accordingly.

There is no doubt about it: COVID-19 presents a significant challenge for public education. However, as we have seen time and time again throughout history, our teachers are resilient; they are qualified; and they are doing one of the most crucial jobs in the world: preparing future generations of citizens to engage in an everchanging and evolving society. If you are a teacher, please know this: your community supports you. If you aren’t a teacher yourself, make sure a teacher gets the message: we have your backs, and we are in this together.

What We Know and Still Don’t Know About COVID-19 by Carla Cantor and Caroline Harting (July 22, 2020).
Nearly 100k children tested positive for COVID-19 in last two weeks of July by Ben Kesslen (August 10, 2020)
How Safe Is Your School's Reopening Plan? Here's What To Look For by Anya Kamenetz, Patti Neighmond, Jane Greenhalgh, Allison Aubrey, & Carmel Wroth. (August 6, 2020)
How to Make Lessons Cohesive When Teaching Both Remote and In-Person Classes by Sarah Schwart (August 5, 2020)
How to Make Lessons Cohesive When Teaching Both Remote and In-Person Classes by Sarah Schwartz (August 5, 2020)

William Toledo is an Assistant Professor of Social Studies Education in the College of Education at the University of Nevada, Reno. Dr. Toledo's research focuses on (a) social studies education in pre-K-12 classrooms and (b) the experiences of LGBTQ+-identifying teachers in public schools.

By: William Toledo, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Social Studies Education

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Elizabeth Lesser Shares How She Lifted Herself Out of Pandemic Despair

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When it became apparent that a virus was spreading around the globe, my first reaction was one of disbelief: We’ll surely eradicate this before it turns into a pandemic! Soon enough my disbelief morphed into fear, and then horror and grief for those who were sick and dying in Asia, Europe, and slowly, steadily...everywhere. Along with those feelings came a strange kind of optimism, a faith that we all might learn something important. Like when I watched videos of people in Italy under lockdown standing on their balconies holding candles and singing songs of hope into the darkened streets. Or as travel ceased and traffic stood still and the world got a little quieter, the air a little cleaner—I could almost hear the trees breathing sighs of relief.

In the early spring of 2020, when the pandemic took hold here in the United States and life as we knew it ground to a halt, I wondered, even with the trauma and loss, could this be the Great Slowdown we needed? People retweeted the quote “Mother Nature has sent us to our rooms.” Could that message portend a teachable moment? Maybe doing less, and doing with less, would reveal the value of enough instead of chasing after more, more, more. Maybe now we’d start to truly appreciate the people whose work keeps us alive and well: the farmers, truckers, grocery baggers; the staff who work in our hospitals; the home health aides who care for our parents; the daycare instructors and school teachers who safeguard our children’s future. And maybe, just maybe, the pandemic would finally confirm for us thick-headed humans this plain truth: What happens to even just one of us affects all of us.

My grand optimism began to waver as the weeks of isolation became months and Covid-19 cases doubled, then tripled. Schools closed. Hospitals ran out of masks and ventilators; millions of people got sick, and hundreds of thousands died. People lost their jobs, their homes, their loved ones, their mental health, their way of life. Almost no individual, community, or business was untouched by fear or pain or loss, including my own nonprofit center, which for 40 years had been teaching people to meditate, to heal, to spin trauma into the gold of growth.

.css-meat1u:before{margin-bottom:1.2rem;height:2.25rem;content:'“';display:block;font-size:4.375rem;line-height:1.1;font-family:Juana,Juana-weight300-roboto,Juana-weight300-local,Georgia,Times,Serif;font-weight:300;} .css-mn32pc{font-family:Juana,Juana-weight300-upcase-roboto,Juana-weight300-upcase-local,Georgia,Times,Serif;font-size:1.625rem;font-weight:300;letter-spacing:0.0075rem;line-height:1.2;margin:0rem;text-transform:uppercase;}@media(max-width: 64rem){.css-mn32pc{font-size:2.25rem;line-height:1;}}@media(min-width: 48rem){.css-mn32pc{font-size:2.375rem;line-height:1;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-mn32pc{font-size:2.75rem;line-height:1;}}.css-mn32pc b,.css-mn32pc strong{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;}.css-mn32pc em,.css-mn32pc i{font-style:italic;font-family:inherit;} “What happens to even just one of us affects all of us.”

As 2020 came to a close, I began to wonder if my dream of the Great Slowdown was becoming a sorrowful nightmare: the Great Meltdown. As a teacher of mindfulness, sometimes I am my own worst student; life during lockdown tested me greatly, and watching the news or doom-scrolling through social media didn’t help. I began to flunk out of inner-peace school, started reacting to stress in decidedly unenlightened ways, yelling at the TV or exploding in anger during interminable Zoom meetings.

I gave in to despair when we had to let go of another staff member at work, or when I couldn’t see my kids, who live in far-flung places. I had stopped accessing my “balcony brain”—that part of myself that can calmly observe any situation, pause before reacting, and make wise, compassionate decisions. I was spending more time in my “basement brain,” heeding the vigilant, volatile caveman within. Eventually, my burnout caught up with me, and I landed in the emergency room with a gastrointestinal issue. It was then that my darling husband suggested I try some of my own medicine—the stuff I have written several books about. “You know,” he said gently, “things like meditation and exercise. Things for your trauma and grief. Things for your soul.” Duh!

So here’s what I did. I turned to the words of some of my greatest teachers. I keep a basket of their quotes on my desk. I’m always adding to it—beautiful lines from poets, mind-blowing bits from scientists, motivation from activists, quiet wisdom from spiritual leaders. I often choose one to guide me through the day. This time, I decided that whatever quote my hand touched first would serve as my GPS back into what I call the four landscapes of the human journey: mind, body, heart, and soul.

The first words I picked gave me goosebumps: “Today’s mighty oak is yesterday’s nut that held its ground.” The phrase is attributed to Rosa Parks, and I felt as though she had reached down from the heavens to remind me that everything I needed was already within me. I could be that little acorn again and reroot and rise strong. I knew how to do that. I had done so before in other difficult times. I had held my ground in the shattered aftermath of divorce and come out the other side a stronger and more empathetic person. I had rooted myself in my inner strength when I was my sister’s bone marrow donor. And when we lost her, I found in those ashes the true heart of friendship. Here I was again, trying, like so many of us, to reemerge from the pandemic with lessons learned, inner strength, and something of value to offer.

I followed Mrs. Parks’ guidance and went back to the tools that never fail me: Meditation to activate my “balcony brain” and lift the veil from my clouded mind. Exercise to reclaim my body and physical vitality. The simple prayer of putting my hand on my heart and feeling flooded with forgiveness and tenderness, hope and gratitude. Walks in nature and dips back into my favorite spiritual texts to reconnect with my all-knowing soul. As I felt my strength returning, I was reminded how despair and negativity can spread like a virus, too. When they do, taking the soul’s vaster view and being an agent of uplift feels almost revolutionary. Doing so is an act of sanity and an offering of healing.

Historically, pandemics have jump-started innovation or they have slid humanity backwards into oppression. This is our era; we get to choose. Life after Covid-19 does not have to be a Great Meltdown, or a Great Slowdown. Maybe, just maybe, it will be a Great Wake-up—a global event that breaks us open and waters the seeds of our best selves. Because each one of us can be that acorn, holding our ground, lifting our sights, and, together, becoming a forest of mighty oaks.

Elizabeth Lesser is the author of Cassandra Speaks: When Women Are the Storytellers, The Human Story Changes as well as the bestselling Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow and Marrow: Love, Loss & What Matters Most . She is the cofounder of Omega Institute, has given two popular TED talks, and is a member of Oprah Winfrey’s Super Soul 100.

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First day at school, amid the pandemic, both parents and children are happy to be back at school, and do not wish to return to distance learning..

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This September, the start of the school year seemed more overwhelming than ever before. One could observe the mixed feelings of excitement, joy, and confusion among the students, parents, and teachers at Sagarejo’s Public Schools #1 and #4.

Early morning on the first day of school, students began gathering in the garden of Sagarejo’s Public School #4. While it is not mandatory for the students to wear masks, many of them — including the youngest among them — were voluntarily covering their faces. This was not done solely for the purpose of hygienic protection, but also to demonstrate students’ awareness about COVID-19. After the many weeks of distance learning, which was challenging for children, parents, and teachers alike, the willingness to go back to normal learning processes is now demonstrably high; everyone displays a readiness to comply with the new safety regulations set by the government.

All the standard safety procedures are observed as children enter the school building: they pass a disinfection barrier, a thermal screening, and they sanitize their hands. These procedures delay entrance to the classroom, so children have to be at school 30 minutes earlier ensuring timely arrival for their first lessons.

Although hand sanitizers are installed throughout the building, teachers also encourage the children to go to the restrooms and wash their hands after each lesson.

The first day back in the classroom was unusual and emotional for both students and teachers. Wearing a mask, which is mandatory for teachers, makes their jobs physically harder due to the strained breathing. Masks also cover their emotional expressions, requiring students to focus harder to equally understand the information teachers are conveying.

The first lesson for all students was dedicated to sharing more information about COVID-19 and related safety regulations. Children were also introduced to their daily schedules.

First graders were overwhelmed by their first day back at school, however, those feelings would have been present with or without COVID-19. The first graders’ parents believe that their children’s feelings towards school depend greatly on developing an uninterrupted routine of in-school attendance. Some parents think that distance learning could ruin the children’s overall understanding of the school, and moreover, that this could be damaging to their mental health.

little ones entering classroom for the first time

Both parents and children are happy to be back at school, and do not wish to return to distance learning. They say that they are ready to follow all the regulations set by the authorities.

Eighth grade students emphasize how important it is to be physically present in the classroom, to interact with friends, and to share opinions about different subjects with each other and with their teachers.

The readiness and enthusiasm of the parents, children, and administration to adapt to the new set of in-school rules makes the safe management of the learning process possible during this shared COVID-19 reality.

How to prepare your child for preschool

Playful ways to ease the transition.

Beyond the Classroom

How interactive catch-up classes are changing academic performance for children in Georgia

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This essay is an opportunity to share your pandemic experience and the lessons learned. The college admissions process has experienced significant changes as a result of COVID-19, creating new challenges for high school students. Since the onset of the pandemic, admissions officers have strongly emphasized a more holistic review process.
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PERSONAL ESSAY: On Graduating in a Pandemic. Four years ago, I entered Yale as part of the class of 2021, and now the year I both dreaded and anticipated is here. It's 2021; my senior spring. What I imagined would be a victory lap after three and a half of the best years of my life looks a lot more like a slog to an ever-moving finish line.
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The student or a family member had COVID-19 or suffered other illnesses due to confinement during the pandemic. The student suffered from a lack of internet access and other online learning challenges. Students who dealt with problems registering for or taking standardized tests and AP exams. Jeff Schiffman of the Tulane University admissions ...
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Obviously, this COVID-19 application essay is new for everyone, so no one has experience with it. Applicants haven't had to answer these questions previously, and application committees have never had to read these essays. At the end of the day, you have to approach this part of the application doing what feels right to you.
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A Pandemic College Essay That Probably Won't Get You Into Brown. By Michael Ian Black. March 29, 2021. Illustration by Luci Gutiérrez. Community disruptions such as COVID -19 and natural ...
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Writing About Coronavirus in Main and Supplemental Essays. Students can choose to write a full-length college essay on the coronavirus or summarize their experience in a shorter form. To help ...
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This year, students applying to college through the Common App will be able to submit an optional essay detailing their experiences (both positive and negative) during the Covid-19 pandemic.
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The Covid 19 pandemic has affected many aspects of school life, all in order to prevent any further spread of the disease. Our school is working hard to go back to the normal school life we used to have before the global pandemic. Yet, parents are still worried about their kids, and teachers about their students.
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The global impact of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, means colleges and prospective students alike are in for an admissions cycle like no other. Major college admissions factors are suddenly skewed. "I can't help but think other (admissions) factors are going to matter more," says Ethan Sawyer, founder of the College Essay Guy, a website that offers free and paid essay ...
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My grand optimism began to waver as the weeks of isolation became months and Covid-19 cases doubled, then tripled. Schools closed. ... quiet wisdom from spiritual leaders. I often choose one to guide me through the day. This time, I decided that whatever quote my hand touched first would serve as my GPS back into what I call the four landscapes ...
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17 September 2020. This September, the start of the school year seemed more overwhelming than ever before. One could observe the mixed feelings of excitement, joy, and confusion among the students, parents, and teachers at Sagarejo's Public Schools #1 and #4. Early morning on the first day of school, students began gathering in the garden of ...
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