by Hayley Foran

Two weeks ago, on March 11, 2020, I was carelessly soaking in South Carolina with a group of good friends on spring break. We were all following the COVID-19 news; we’d just watched the Oval Office Address in our Airbnb the night before. We had no idea that’d be our last night as “real” RIT students. 

My buddy Ben threw a frisbee at me. “Do you think RIT will close?”

I caught it. “No way. It’s not that bad.” I threw it back.

A call caught our attention from our building’s first floor balcony.

“Hey, did your school close yet?”

We all looked around to a group of kids we’d met earlier in the week and spent a few nights out with. They all attended Ohio State.

“We just got an extended spring break. We’re probably going to pack up here and just go to Florida at the end of the week.”

I remember laughing at that and suggesting to my group that maybe we should all head further south, too, instead of driving back up the next morning as planned.

We kept at it for a couple more hours before we went in for dinner. Then we got our first email. “Coronavirus Alters University Schedule.”

I’m a senior Journalism and Political Science student at RIT. I am a member of the Zeta Tau Alpha Fraternity and I lived in the ZTA Mansion on Greek Row. One week before spring break, I unknowingly sat in my very last college class and spent my very last night with my sisters at our Chapter house. We didn’t know. How could we?

Within the next week, I had packed up four years of residency in Rochester, NY, said goodbye to the few friends who had bothered to return from spring break at all and went home, grudgingly, to Syracuse, NY.

When I got home, my house greeted me solemnly. My parents had just lost over $100,000 in the stock market. My younger brother, much to my mother’s distaste, gloated about no longer having to take his SATs. We all lamented over his canceled spring musical. My father talked on the phone with a coworker about their raises being cut for the year and the bleak prospect of finding a new job at his age. He’ll be 57 next Sunday. I went upstairs to my empty bedroom and moved back in.

My mom has since set up a make-shift home office in my older brother’s old room. My dad is making headway on some home projects he didn’t have time for before. My younger brother is spending his time with our two new puppies and attending his favorite physics class online.

I’ve done my best to stay positive about the new “alternative methods” of education. I tell myself that, regardless of how I finish my degrees, at least I’ll have them, but there’s something —everything — about campus life that really encourages me to be my best. I worry now that my grades will sink and with them, my high-spirits.

Additionally, as a graduating senior, there were many events that I was looking forward to enjoying. All the lasts, all the goodbyes, the smooth transition into “adulthood,” whatever that means … I’ll never get any of them.

The most disappointing development was the cancelation of commencement. I pushed myself through a tough course load this semester, and every semester since August 2016, knowing that it would all be worth it when I dressed in my regalia and walked the stage at graduation.

I’m wrestling with all these feelings that I find to be rather selfish, given the big picture. There are young kids in my district with no lunches, college students with no homes to return to, close colleagues who have lost family members to the virus.

I turn now to celebrate my accomplishments and the blessings of my every day alone while things remain holistically uncertain.

Since I was a newly-minted freshman in 2016, I have worked six on-campus jobs for three of RIT’s colleges and NTID – at one point, five of which were at the same time. I played two varsity sports. I joined a service sorority for which I served two e-board positions. I completed three co-ops. I was inducted into a national honor society. I was an asset to new student orientation. I’ve made great friends for life.

It wasn’t all bad in the end. It won’t be all bad in the end. Of that, I am certain.