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Collected Item: “Quarantine Sucks But So Does Student Debt”

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Quarantine Sucks But So Does Student Debt

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Essay

Tell us a story; share your experience. Describe what the object or story you've uploaded says about the pandemic, and/or why what you've submitted is important to you.

It has become a universal agreement that Covid-19 is absolutely one of the worse things to happen on this planet. Many people have been impacted in many ways, whether it’s not being able to see their loved ones while they’re on their death beds, contracting the virus, losing your job, your main source of income losing their job so your household takes a financial hit or losing your best parts of senior year. For me, the most that Covid-19 has done as far as negatively, is by stripping my senior year away...and my first fall semester of college. As much as I have been in mourning since it was announced we were no longer getting what we were promised at the young age of six, such as proper graduation, I have matured in my position and realized that all I’ve lost was my senior year, where others have lost their loved ones or even their lives.
I won’t go much further into my senior year when my everyday life has changed way more above that. I have a job. Before quarantine, I was working very few shifts due to school hours restricting my work hours. The main point of having this job was to save up money, which I will wrap back around to why it’s actually a good thing that my fall semester got announced it will predominantly be online. When quarantine happened, I was fortunate enough to be amongst the very few that did not lose their job. When the news broke out that we will be put on quarantine but the restaurant I work at will stay open, my manager jumped right on that and scheduled me as much as possible. And I didn’t complain one bit. This is a perfect opportunity for me to catch up financially so I am not totally swamped in student debt.
This is the part where I come full circle and explain why I’m actually glad my school announced that they’ll be starting the fall semester online. Again, I am guilty of mourning losing my “first day” of college, but I realized, I get an entire semester where the majority of the expenses I would be paying for, I won’t be and I will still be working. It won’t be much, but as someone who isn’t very frugal, quarantine has been an enormous aid to my bank account. With stay-at-home order, I’m never going out with friends and spending money on things I have plenty of at home.
My point of talking about all of the great things that have happened to me during quarantine is not to dismiss how terrible this entire pandemic has been worldwide, it’s to show that even though this sucks, I’ve been trying my best to look at things optimistically because with me losing my graduation and not being able to see my friends, I haven’t been getting a whole lot of serotonin lately, so I have no choice to look on the bright side.

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Jocelyn Gallardo

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2020-05-29
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