By Lavender VandeWal

This session highlighted the experiences of students and faculty at RIT’s global campuses, including Hong Kong, Croatia and Kosovo. We learned about the support they received from the university, and of the challenges the populations faced. These stories show the resilience of our RIT community, as well as how COVID really brought us all together.

The first presenter was a student from the Hong Kong campus. Due to their location, the pandemic really began in December of 2019 for them. Many international students were forced to go home, and those that could stay had to take classes online of course. This specific student was also tasked with taking care of the pets that unfortunately had to be left behind by some of the international students. The technology that Hong Kong developed to fight the pandemic became pivotal for RIT as well. It allowed them to keep track of their students’ health which gave the school a much better idea of how things were going. 

The following presenters were a professor and a student from the Kosovo campus. Their class was interrupted by the pandemic, which forced both the professor and the students to reimagine their final project. Originally they were tasked with creating a garment of some kind, but due to supply chain issues related to the pandemic, they were very limited in the fabrics and resources available. This led to the student creating a line of fashionable and functional face masks, that were made from fabrics and clothes she had inherited from her grandmother. 

Croatia was represented by a professor, who did not have any anecdotal stories to share, but did want to talk about the support he received from RIT. Every professor at the Croatian campuses were given camera and microphone equipment to help ease the transition to zoom. This allowed them to avoid certain technical difficulties that we at the RIT main campus are very familiar with. 

Beyond Rochester was a really amazing collection of stories that showed the close knit communities of RIT’s global campuses, which were only brought more together by COVID. They faced many different challenges depending on their levels of quarantine and the nature of the pandemic in their country, which makes their stories as part of RIT especially unique and important.