On March 11, Wesleyan made the painstaking decision to move the rest of the semester online, asking students to move out. For those following the news of other campus closures, this move seemed both inevitable and unfathomable. First, on March 9, Amherst cut the cord. Harvard followed suit the next morning. From there, the flood gates opened and the dominoes fell in seemingly arbitrary fashion. The next day, I watched and re-watched Michael Roth’s video indicating that Wesleyan would also shut its doors.
In the subsequent weeks, COVID-19 has ruptured life, for me, as both a citizen and a college student. America stands on the precipice of the unknown. Completely inundated with COVID-19 cases, daily life has moved—for good reason—inside. Wesleyan, along with most schools around the world, now stands empty, without most of its student body. Classes have hastily re-organized online as lecture halls have been traded in for Zoom meetings.
As a citizen, I can’t begin to predict what the world might look like in the coming months, how much longer we will need to self-isolate, or when life will go back to normal. Paradoxically, as a college senior, my remaining weeks as a Wesleyan student feel decided.
Hurried travel restrictions forced most of my things into storage and me on a 22-hour flight home. The prospect of an on-time senior week and commencement, which many Wesleyan students clung to as the last shred of normalcy, quickly became an impossibility, with President Roth announcing on April 2 that graduation would be postponed.
Though difficult to accept, my recent journey home is certainly my last as an undergraduate. I now sit 8,500 miles away from Middletown, hastily uprooted from Wesleyan and confined to self-isolation in my room in Bangkok. I’m not surrounded by my friends or counting down the days until graduation. Instead, I get on Zoom at night—thanks to an eleven-hour time zone difference–to face the bitter and impersonal end to my college life.
What I and my fellow graduating seniors face is the uncomfortable reality that, besides a few online class sessions and some papers left to write, normal collegiate life is over.
In the midst of this pandemic emerging as a real threat, Dan Chiasson, an English Professor at Wellesley, wrote a piece in the New Yorker titled “The Coronavirus and the Ruptured Narrative of Campus Life.” In it, he writes, “If spring means the end of something–as it does for college students, and especially for seniors–the losses are more painful, but somehow the orderly ceremonies of the term can compensate. For that stately process to be undermined by a panic is obscene.”
As college seniors graduating during a pandemic, circumstances have forced many of us to say goodbye to our college lives in an abnormal and unsettling fashion—far away from the books, the friends, and the setting that defined a formative part of our lives.
Before leaving Middletown, I picked up food at a local restaurant and briefly spoke to the owner. He told me, “You know, these last two months of the semester are really some of the greatest times in Middletown; the seniors are so happy. I’m sorry you don’t get to have that.”
This, I’m sure, is a refrain that many of my fellow seniors have heard. College is a liberating and inherently individualized experience, yet, commencement is almost universally applicable to all of us—a way to forever tether us to an institution. In a way these comments are spot-on. Missing out on the chance to celebrate four years of accomplishments and triumphs leaves a story without a promised ending. It leaves us to reflect alone.
Yet, sitting in my room far away from Wesleyan, my thoughts have veered away from the big picture occasions that won’t take place to the experiences that punctuated my time at Wesleyan: the little things that encompassed a routine. I will miss my walks across campus from PAC to Usdan, my stocking shifts at Pi Café, the odd sunny day spent sitting on Foss Hill. I think back to the different rooms I lived in on campus, the classes I took. I dig deeper into my thoughts, from the time I arrived at Bennet Hall as a freshmen to when I last saw Olin on the Uber ride to the airport.
Having to adapt to a new routine and knowing that I won’t be returning to Middletown any time soon has revealed, in unequivocal terms, what Wesleyan meant to me—it was home. And it pains me to know that I, along with my classmates, won’t get the “orderly ceremonies” that would provide some semblance of cathartic relief, and set us on a path into the future. Yet, my hasty exile has impressed upon me a feeling I don’t think any celebration could: a profound and enduring gratitude for an institution—a combination of all the places and people—that forced me to grow and change. The abrupt end doesn’t just come with shattered expectations, but with earnest reflection, ensuring that my memories are not quickly forgotten. And in these tumultuous times, I find that these connections and memories endure beyond Wesleyan. Zoom meetings provide a sense of familiarity, and above all, the powerful feeling that we are not alone. It reminds me that I have every reason to celebrate after this pandemic ends with the people I have come to hold dear, even if it’s missing pomp and circumstance.
Cleaning my room at home, I’ve started rummaging through all of the old documents that have accumulated on my book shelf. Nestled between some old papers from high school, I found a FedEx envelope. Inside was the first piece paper that I received from Wesleyan: an acceptance letter. Seeing it quickly hearkened back to the morning I checked my admissions portal to find it for first time. I remember being both excited and unsure of what my college experience would look like.
Now, I look at the same piece of paper. I think of Wesleyan and my college narrative, ruptured before reaching its promised end. Still, I can’t help but smile.
Tobias Wertime can be reached at twertime@wesleyan.edu.