By: Sarah Gomez, Staff Writer
Coming into a new environment all alone, as a teenager, is difficult to say in the least. Starting without any family or friends and having to live on your own for the first time in your life is a terrifying thought. Every new freshman faces this challenge, but eventually, everything works itself out, right? Friends are established from dorm floor movie nights and joining clubs during welcome week. It gets easier when you feel less alone when you have a friend to eat dinner with or even just someone in your class you can study with. Freshman year is hard for everyone, but it gets easier once you have something to look forward to, even if it’s something as silly as watching a movie on the quad.
This semester has been like one never before. There have been so many changes to classes, even the ones in person feel surreal. Having classes with masks, spread across the room was something unimaginable this time last year. For the most part, up until March of this year, going to class was something close-knit. A classroom was a place to ask questions and interact easily, and now it feels like there is never a good time to unmute the mic on the Zoom call.
If you stop to think about what the college experience is known for, you’ll find yourself thinking about parties or on-campus events, hanging out with friends, or even being able to engage with your classes. Parties are an obvious loss, COVID-19 made that clear, but the semester is not even halfway through and we have already lost a majority of the other things as well. Everyone on campus is aware of these challenges and for the most part, is trying their best to counteract them. We have seen the efforts taken by the programming board to keep everyone busy and doing some things on campus. From the Wednesday activities to the movies on the quad, the highlight of many students’ weeks was participating in those events. Sadly, the state of Colorado’s Department of Health instructed the university to postpone further events, making everything all the much harder. From laser tag to just watching a movie you love, there are no longer fun activities to get students out of their dorms.
Though it has been said time and time again that “we are in this together,” the challenges we are facing are not equally distributed. A big challenge many first-year students run into is having to start all over. Out of state students and even those from Arvada have problems making friends in their classes or even friends around campus. Some people are having an amazing experience, they have friends from years past with them to enjoy this time with. Some people have friends or family near campus and can enjoy a break from the stress of school and enjoy some familiarity. Some people have no one, people who came from states away, all on their own, and have no one they know for hundreds of miles. Yes, it is very annoying that you can’t hang out with all your friends in a study room but it's even harder having to go on without even having friends. That’s not to say people haven’t put in efforts to make these connections, it is just exponentially harder.
The classroom is a difficult space to make friends nowadays for many reasons. If you are lucky enough to be in person, there is no longer the option to send a kind smile across the room, for it’s covered by a mask and doesn’t look too inviting. It’s even more difficult asking classmates questions now too, since the muffling of the mask makes it easier to just go on without a clue.
It is hard to look forward to the future when the only news we seem to be getting is negative. From the quarantine of the Residence Village to in-person classes always being “next week,” the idea of being able to thrive as a freshman feels a bit ironic. How can we be expected to get out and involved in our community when we have already been told that doing so would result in a fine or worse. The extent of the college experience first-year students are receiving is limited to what we can manage in the walls of our dorms and windows of our technology.
To be a first-year student during a global pandemic has been difficult to say in the least. All of high school we were told college would be life changing. Yet, this semester has been so similar to the last semester of senior year, it has yet to register in my mind that I’m in college at all. I’ll be sure to document when my Regis University experience begins, but for the time being, Zoom will have to suffice. The Class of 2024 has four years ahead of us, hopefully, one will be what we have been waiting for.