College Campus Life

I’ve been living in the campus dorms in Baldwin Hall for the past couple weeks and I’ve noticed that everyone is extremely respectful of the Covid rules in place. All the residents wear their masks outside their dorms, social distance from others wherever they have space to, they all wash their hands often, and when they don’t feel good they stay in their dorms to be safe. When it comes to other students on campus I see many who walk around without their masks on, they walk around with their mask tucked underneath their chin, or they have their masks tucked under their noses. 

Wearing a mask, especially when it’s hot and humid, sucks but the reasoning behind wearing them should be enough to keep it on for a few minutes while you’re walking around or in class when you’re just sitting there. What many people seem to forget is even though they may not be at high risk for getting covid but someone near them or someone in one of their classes could have an underlying health issue that puts them at a higher risk or they could live with someone who’s at a higher risk.

I’m down the middle of if we’ll be online before the end of this semester or continue with on-campus classes. The number of Covid cases seems to continue to rise but a lot of people are becoming less strict with the way they go about their daily lives with Covid still being a major issue. I feel that it’s raising our chances of having to go completely online. I think that if people would continue to make sure they wore their masks everywhere, social distanced in public and class, washed their hands regularly, and stayed in when they didn’t feel well, we will be able to remain on campus and maybe even have more classes switch to in person.

In this picture, I was at a gathering with a number of people from my church group. We all met up off-campus at the guys’ house for dinner and to play frisbee, spike ball, and corn hole. Even though we were all social distanced for the most part we all had our masks on just to protect one another and ourselves. Things like that, seeing people be responsible for themselves, gives me hope that maybe we will get to have in-person classes this year. 

I also continually wonder how Greek and Sorority life will continue with Covid. I understand the importance of these groups but I also feel like with everything going on that all of the events they hold and the amount of people living in such a confined space is a huge risk for not only those students but any other students they come in contact with. I’m not well educated on fraternities or sororities but I do feel that they pose a major threat to the likelihood that we’re able to remain on campus instead of going completely online.

Something that I noticed during rush for Greek and Sorority life is how close everyone is to one another without wearing masks or social distancing. There are hundreds of students participating in rush and if just one of those students is sick it could snowball and result in hundreds of cases of the coronavirus on campus and it would be forced to close. I feel that with how dangerous this pandemic truly is that now just simply isn’t the time to be holding these events especially without enforcing social distancing or the usage of masks.