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Joseph Reitmeyer (000836162)
Ian Delahanty
College Seminar
10/23/2020
My Experience of the COVID-19 Pandemic
I remember some time in early march of 2020 I was in my highschool library i was
scrolling through instagram, I came across a random post that read “BREAKING: A breakout of
a virus by the name of COVID-19 or “corona” virus is rapidly spreading through wu-han china”.
When I read this i thought nothing of it, I thought so what? It's a small virus across the world. A
few weeks later I was sitting in my house completely separated from the life I was living just a
month ago. When the lock down first started I was ecstatic, my last year of highschool and i
didnt even have to do school work to finish it out. I already wanted to be home all day anyway
so how hard would it be to stay home for a month or two? It was over this time I fully realized the
scope of the situation I had entered. My experience with the COVID-19 pandemic has been an
ever evolving puzzle of new challenges that I along with everyone around me has had to figure
out to navigate.
The moment my mom told me that school had been canceled for the foreseeable future i
could not have been happier. I didn't necessarily hate school, but it being the back half of my
senior year I really felt like I was waiting out the last few months anyways. After the first couple
of days of the lock down I was slowly learning the scope of this virus. I was seeing news reports
of increased cases by thousands everyday. I started to realize the things I had given up to keep
ma and my family members safe. Things like hanging out with friends, all the senior year
activities like the class trip and graduation were the last thought in anyone's mind. The first few
weeks of lockdown are really hard to remember because everyday was exactly the same as the
day before. I would wake up mid-day and try to find anything to do around the house that
usually consisted of finding something to eat, playing video games with my friends and sleeping.
2
This lifestyle quickly became extremely tedious and extremely boring and i was extremely lucky
that I was one of the few people nationwide that was still working a job. There is not much more
I can really say about the first few months of the lock down, it was just a repetitive process of
waking up and waiting inside my house for any information about what we were to do next.
The unique part of my experience with lockdown is that I worked in a grocery store
through the lock down. For the first month or two while I stuck at home while everything was
closed and still trying to figure out the only business open were the essential business and this
included the local grocery store i worked at. Before the pandemic I absolutely hated the tedious
nature of my cashiers job but it was good highschool money and something to put on my
resume so I reluctantly stuck with it through my senior year of highschool. I quickly learned that I
was extremely lucky to have this job. Firstly I was one of the few people still actively working a
job and making an income, I felt bad because I didn't necessarily need this job, I didn't have
anyone relying on me or a family to provide for but since the store couldn't train any new
employees during the pandemic I stayed because it was good money and the store needed all
the help it could get. The store offered increased hourly wages for working during the pandemic
as an incentive for employees to keep working, but after those first few weeks of lockdown I
didn't need the extra pay, I was just happy to have a reason to leave my house. I believe that
working this job helped me deal with the stress of the lockdown because it helped me take my
mind off the current world epidemic. Some immediate changes I noticed in the store were that
everyone had to wear masks and gloves at all times, our shifts increased to six hours and we
had to count the number of people that entered the store because we had a maximum capacity.
I was never nervous about contracting COVID, i lived in an area with very low case numbers
and my brother was and still is an EMT so he was also working through the lockdown so I
figured if i get it, I get it. The virus generally didn't seem to do too much to people of my age.
The most recent part of my COVID experience has been trying to attend my first year of
college both in person and online. I am at this moment a student at Springfield College and
3
while I commend the effort by the school to give the most normal version of a freshman year
possible it's definitely been a unique experience. Move in day was spaced out into three days
and the tricky part of this part of move in day was that you had to pack for college like you could
be sent home by next week. The threat of an outbreak always looms around campus, meaning
that we would all be sent home immediately to finish the semester virtually. Exactly half of my
classes are in person and online. Personally I find that online classes suck, it's hard to stare at a
computer screen in a zoom meeting for an hour but like all other situations in this pandemic we
have no choice but to continue to wait to get back to the new normal. The in person classes also
suffer, teachers are forced to use online content to teach their classes. They no longer have
access to field trips, outside the classroom examples, and even in some classes paper handout
to rely on. For example, I'm taking an Event Management class currently and one of the
assignments is to put on and host an event. My group has had to postpone and cancel our
event because of virus concerts. This makes it harder to really get that critical hands on
experience that this usually has to offer. My overall college experiences with the social
distancing rules and regulations hasn't been necessarily bad, just another new situation that
staff and students have to figure out to the best of their ability.
The puzzle of the ever evolving “new normal’ is and will continue to be challenging to
navigate and work through. Even though I think the worst of it is behind us, that being the
complete lockdown of the country, I believe that it will be years before what we consider normal
will come back. This had definitely been a experience that few generations ever ever have to go
through and i can say while it hasn't been pleasurable it is interesting to think about my place in
the history of the worldwide epidemic.
Joseph Reitmeyer (000836162)
Ian Delahanty
College Seminar
10/23/2020
My Experience of the COVID-19 Pandemic
I remember some time in early march of 2020 I was in my highschool library i was
scrolling through instagram, I came across a random post that read “BREAKING: A breakout of
a virus by the name of COVID-19 or “corona” virus is rapidly spreading through wu-han china”.
When I read this i thought nothing of it, I thought so what? It's a small virus across the world. A
few weeks later I was sitting in my house completely separated from the life I was living just a
month ago. When the lock down first started I was ecstatic, my last year of highschool and i
didnt even have to do school work to finish it out. I already wanted to be home all day anyway
so how hard would it be to stay home for a month or two? It was over this time I fully realized the
scope of the situation I had entered. My experience with the COVID-19 pandemic has been an
ever evolving puzzle of new challenges that I along with everyone around me has had to figure
out to navigate.
The moment my mom told me that school had been canceled for the foreseeable future i
could not have been happier. I didn't necessarily hate school, but it being the back half of my
senior year I really felt like I was waiting out the last few months anyways. After the first couple
of days of the lock down I was slowly learning the scope of this virus. I was seeing news reports
of increased cases by thousands everyday. I started to realize the things I had given up to keep
ma and my family members safe. Things like hanging out with friends, all the senior year
activities like the class trip and graduation were the last thought in anyone's mind. The first few
weeks of lockdown are really hard to remember because everyday was exactly the same as the
day before. I would wake up mid-day and try to find anything to do around the house that
usually consisted of finding something to eat, playing video games with my friends and sleeping.
2
This lifestyle quickly became extremely tedious and extremely boring and i was extremely lucky
that I was one of the few people nationwide that was still working a job. There is not much more
I can really say about the first few months of the lock down, it was just a repetitive process of
waking up and waiting inside my house for any information about what we were to do next.
The unique part of my experience with lockdown is that I worked in a grocery store
through the lock down. For the first month or two while I stuck at home while everything was
closed and still trying to figure out the only business open were the essential business and this
included the local grocery store i worked at. Before the pandemic I absolutely hated the tedious
nature of my cashiers job but it was good highschool money and something to put on my
resume so I reluctantly stuck with it through my senior year of highschool. I quickly learned that I
was extremely lucky to have this job. Firstly I was one of the few people still actively working a
job and making an income, I felt bad because I didn't necessarily need this job, I didn't have
anyone relying on me or a family to provide for but since the store couldn't train any new
employees during the pandemic I stayed because it was good money and the store needed all
the help it could get. The store offered increased hourly wages for working during the pandemic
as an incentive for employees to keep working, but after those first few weeks of lockdown I
didn't need the extra pay, I was just happy to have a reason to leave my house. I believe that
working this job helped me deal with the stress of the lockdown because it helped me take my
mind off the current world epidemic. Some immediate changes I noticed in the store were that
everyone had to wear masks and gloves at all times, our shifts increased to six hours and we
had to count the number of people that entered the store because we had a maximum capacity.
I was never nervous about contracting COVID, i lived in an area with very low case numbers
and my brother was and still is an EMT so he was also working through the lockdown so I
figured if i get it, I get it. The virus generally didn't seem to do too much to people of my age.
The most recent part of my COVID experience has been trying to attend my first year of
college both in person and online. I am at this moment a student at Springfield College and
3
while I commend the effort by the school to give the most normal version of a freshman year
possible it's definitely been a unique experience. Move in day was spaced out into three days
and the tricky part of this part of move in day was that you had to pack for college like you could
be sent home by next week. The threat of an outbreak always looms around campus, meaning
that we would all be sent home immediately to finish the semester virtually. Exactly half of my
classes are in person and online. Personally I find that online classes suck, it's hard to stare at a
computer screen in a zoom meeting for an hour but like all other situations in this pandemic we
have no choice but to continue to wait to get back to the new normal. The in person classes also
suffer, teachers are forced to use online content to teach their classes. They no longer have
access to field trips, outside the classroom examples, and even in some classes paper handout
to rely on. For example, I'm taking an Event Management class currently and one of the
assignments is to put on and host an event. My group has had to postpone and cancel our
event because of virus concerts. This makes it harder to really get that critical hands on
experience that this usually has to offer. My overall college experiences with the social
distancing rules and regulations hasn't been necessarily bad, just another new situation that
staff and students have to figure out to the best of their ability.
The puzzle of the ever evolving “new normal’ is and will continue to be challenging to
navigate and work through. Even though I think the worst of it is behind us, that being the
complete lockdown of the country, I believe that it will be years before what we consider normal
will come back. This had definitely been a experience that few generations ever ever have to go
through and i can say while it hasn't been pleasurable it is interesting to think about my place in
the history of the worldwide epidemic.