So, I’m a sophomore now, which means I graduated high school in 2020. I was part of the infamous class of 2020, albeit we were just high schoolers. I interviewed current high school seniors the other day and realized that they were just sophomores when the pandemic started.
It made me feel so old.
But it also made me reflect on how I managed to end up here.
People say that other classes in the middle of the pandemic have it worse because they never got back to a normal life, but the thing is, I feel like we had it worse. Because we graduated in the height of the pandemic where nobody really knew how to deal with it. Everything was canceled, from senior activities to prom, because we just didn’t know how to safely hold those things anymore. It felt like the school was trying to kick us out at that point. We ended our high school lives quietly but left with the knowledge that we missed so much. Our last year with friends that we’ve known since middle school in a town we’ve lived in our entire lives. Gone. As a senior, I walked out of school on Friday, March 13th,and never even realized that I would never walk back into the school as a student again. In the blink of an eye, we graduated and left.
Then we came to college, and for the first year of our lives away from home, we had a completely different experience. Our first week at WashU was on Zoom. Most of my classes were on Zoom. I feel like we missed out on a lot of things that came with in-person experiences. Oh, college tried. I appreciate the effort that WashU exerted to give us a decent year. But I passed through my first year quickly and quietly. I never met that many people and never connected with many people. The so-called college experience was markedly different. For the first year at college, it was far less interesting than people would think. It wasn’t until this year that I realized how easy it is to just talk with the person sitting next to you in class. How fun it truly is to walk on campus more and spend time with friends you’ve just met.
I guess sophomore year is a bit of freshman year part 2. I still have no idea where anything is on campus. I miss the ease of Grubhub dining options and the more or less empty BD. But I don’t miss online classes. Now that I’m in person, I don’t even know how I managed to last one and a half-hour in my online classes. I’m finally getting that taste of college. It’s a lot of walking, in my opinion. And staying outside of my dorm, which I surprisingly don’t mind too much. It’s nice to be more spontaneous in life.
But enjoy the in-person school year. If the pandemic taught us anything, I hope it’s that things can change in an instance, and treasure your moment while you can.