A Robbed Sophomore Experience

Wow, sophomore year, huh? Where do I even begin…

Sophomore year was absolutely crazy. It started and ended all in a flash, and all I can really remember is not doing much. You see, there is this wonderful thing that happened at the end of my freshman year of college called, “COVID-19”. It’s a little niche and not really well known, so I don’t blame you if you haven’t heard of it. COVID completely wrecked my sophomore school year. Every day blended together, it felt like the whole year was groundhog day. However, there were a few things that stood out.

This is what I remember: 

 My schedule

I remember having all of my classes online (because ya know, COVID.) It was a blessing and a curse. Sometimes, online classes rule. You have more free time, you don’t have to be there in person and you can just take it at your own speed. Most of my classes were this way, and that was pretty nice. However, the classes were structured pretty poorly.  In-person classes did not translate to an online environment.. The administration didn’t know what to tell the teachers to do, and the teachers had trouble converting to an online teaching experience. This unfortunately caused most information I learned to go in one ear and out the other.

Connections

I did not become friends with a single new person that entire year. I could see other people’s little faces during zoom classes, but most of the time they had their cameras off. I could get a read on their personality by listening to them talk and answer questions, but most of the time they just typed the answer in the chat. It was sad to have the only way to meet others be so ineffective. Half of my college career was over, and I hadn’t really met anyone. It sucked, but life went on.

Roommates

My roommates were the only friends I really had during the semester, and they helped me through it. We managed to get a suite on campus, so we each had our own room and we had a living room area. I would spend most of my days with them for a good part of the day – eating food, playing games, watching movies, studying, etc. I’m still close to all of them, even still living with two of the three. To be honest, I don’t think I could have made it through the year without those kings carrying me on their shoulders.

The Unplanned Outing

There was one legendary night that stands out the most in my memory. It was during the second semester of sophomore year, and all of us were anxious to go out and do something, meet new people, try new things. We weren’t given much of a chance to do that at any point during the year. We were hanging out together in the living room and then all of a sudden, BAM! The power went out for the entire dorm floor. We convened in the hall and met some new people who lived in other rooms on our floor. We decided it was time to break the rules and ventured to other buildings on campus instead of just sitting in the dark waiting for the problem to be fixed.  We met new people who were going through the same power outage in their dorms on other sides of campus. They had also decided to go and walk around campus that night. That was the only time that anything out of the ordinary happened, and it was seared into my memory. I wish I could have experienced more things like that during my sophomore year, but it is what it is.

Overall, the sophomore year experience was not what I hoped it would be. I don’t think it was for anyone else, either. Everyone stayed in their dorms and did their classes online, but we all had different ways of coping through the year. In the end, we all got through it and moved on to a more normal college experience. I just hope that no one else has to have any of their college career robbed like that. It was not fun living in a groundhog day scenario for the entire year.