{"id":3155,"date":"2020-12-02T23:13:33","date_gmt":"2020-12-02T23:13:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/160-the-words\/?page_id=3155"},"modified":"2024-08-19T17:41:09","modified_gmt":"2024-08-19T17:41:09","slug":"tales-from-a-first-year-in-quarantine","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/tales-from-a-first-year-in-quarantine\/","title":{"rendered":"Tales from a First Year in Quarantine"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Chloe Moore ’24<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Chloe
Chole Moore in the English office<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Move-in day was sunny and warm\u2014not at all representative of general Minnesota weather trends. Settling into my dorm was a new beginning, under very complicated circumstances. There was the thrill of a new space, of living alone (my sister and I shared bunk beds for most of my life), of hanging up my art and posters and making a Dupre double into a new kind of home. The first few days of existing on campus, before classes started, felt more like summer camp than anything else, with amoebic circles of people forming on the lawns, talking a little too loudly to hear each other through masks. Once classes started, it started to settle in that this wasn\u2019t a normal experience. As a first year, I had no previous college experience to which I could compare this newfangled kind of learning. Mostly, I was just excited to be on campus, taking absolutely no math classes, and not spending 7 hours of every day in class. That\u2019s not to say everything was easy\u2014 Zoom does get tiring, and not being able to go <\/span>anywhere<\/span><\/i> makes even the silhouette of Old Main get old. Like many aspects of quarantine, first semester has been a kind of hazy balance, the Macalester campus a bubble within a country in crisis.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The semester can be defined most aptly as an ongoing \u201cwe\u2019re doing our best.\u201d Professors had to figure out how to teach on Zoom, students had to adjust to juggling massive public health responsibility with an intensified schedule, and first years in particular had to find a way to turn boxes on a computer screen into community. The semester became an exercise in making a <\/span>14\u20198\u201d x 14\u20194\u201d room into a kind of time travelling machine; I delved into the Chartist movement in my first-year course, hurtled towards decolonial futures in my women\u2019s studies class, and wandered Baldwin\u2019s Paris in an American studies course. The balance, then, has been between intellectual and social stimulation. I don\u2019t think my brain has ever been happier than it was this semester, because for the first time in my academic career, my classes are being spent on critical analyses and in-depth writing assignments, rather than relitigating whether or not homophobia is bad (thanks, high school). My Dupre cubicle became so much more than four cement walls as it filled up with books and ideas. The cold weather did eventually put a damper on the social scene, but Caf\u00e9 Mac provided respites from the monotony of an otherwise virtual day. And working in the English department offered a regular schedule and good company on Wednesday nights to combat the soupy feeling of time in isolation.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Compared to my friends at other colleges, I definitely feel like I lucked out. Phoning friends who spend upwards of six hours a day on Zoom, or peers who were taking college classes from their childhood homes, I\u2019m mainly struck by a sense of immense gratitude that I\u2019m able to be on campus at all. Given that it\u2019s just first years on campus now, I\u2019m sure Macalester will feel different when we eventually fill back up. That\u2019s what I\u2019m most looking forward to; safety is the top priority, of course, but it\u2019s certainly strange to be the only fish in a very small pond. The #heymac tag on Twitter only does so much for social interaction. In that sense, however, social media has been incredibly helpful for connecting with other students. I made friends with other early decision admits before we got to campus, which made it a lot easier to interact meaningfully from a distance.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

All in all, it\u2019s been a strange semester, but not a bad one. Working in the English department has certainly been the highlight of the year thus far. Our Coffee Houses are a welcome break in the week, and one of the only Zoom scenarios that is consistently fun. Community-building events, like a live-streamed conversation with Claudia Rankine and a book talk from Kao Kalia Yang, have been some of the most interesting things I\u2019ve gotten to listen to in a while. So even though we\u2019re physically distant, I feel in many ways more intellectually connected to the world around me, in past and present manifestations, than ever before. Nothing is easy during a pandemic, but in between the snowstorms and stillness, I can confidently say that Macalester feels like home.<\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Chloe Moore ’24 Move-in day was sunny and warm\u2014not at all representative of general Minnesota weather trends. Settling into my dorm was a new beginning, under very complicated circumstances. There was the thrill of a new space, of living alone (my sister and I shared bunk beds for most of my life), of hanging […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":374,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-3155","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/374"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3155"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8915,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3155\/revisions\/8915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}