Items

• 2020-05-04

  A Life in Coronavirus Isolation: The Importance of Human Interaction

  I am currently a rising junior studying at Bates College. This semester has been extremely tough for me, as our school switched to remote learning about halfway through due to the Coronavirus, forcing myself and the entirety of the student body to go home and continue classes online. When the administration announced that we would be required to leave campus on Friday, March 13th, the student body had the opposite reaction of what the faculty had hoped would happen. As opposed to packing up and getting away from campus immediately, the vast majority of the student body, including myself, partied like there was no plague that could kill us all. I began to appreciate how important genuine human interactions were- sober or not- and knew that this switch to strict isolation in my home would certainly act as a stressor for the mental health issues I had been dealing with for most of my life. The move to online learning was particularly tough for me, as whereas some of my peers still had set lecture times with their professors and classmates on Zoom, all of my course's professors made the choice to either just post powerpoints and video lectures, or, in one case have us continue to work through the class material, teaching ourselves the ideas in small groups (which turned out to be particularly ineffective, as the groups were mostly focused on dividing up work amongst ourselves). This setup not only completely threw my sleep schedule off, where I was falling asleep around 4 or 5 in the morning, and sleeping till 2 or 3 in the afternoon, but the lack of human interaction and the inability to put myself in a working environment led the time I had dedicated to getting my assignments done extremely unproductive. As the end of the semester neared, the considerably lighter workload that had been given to us became much heavier, as I planned out a schedule for me to finish all my course assignments in 2 weeks, then 1 week, then 5 days, and then 48 hours. When mapping out that last plan, I knew that I had to follow it to a T, and it will be one of the hardest things I ever had to do. However, much like the first 2 months in isolation, I continued to be extremely unproductive, despite staying up however long it would take for me to finally get to work. The stress had finally got to me, and I hit rock bottom the morning after I had successfully carried out the most important parts of my 48-hour plan. COVID-19 was the stressor for my mental health issues to impact my life like they never had before.
• 
  04/29/2020

  Oliver Kaplan Oral History, 2020/04/29

  Oliver Kaplan begins this recording by stating how the monologue is for a college assignment in their “China in the world” class. They then speak about how they were aware of the virus well before its spread across the world, due to the class they were taking. Initially Oliver thought the virus would be contained in China, but realized that it was going to become a larger issue when he noticed anti-Chinese sentiments at his college in Maine. Oliver then describes how shortly after that his school shut down and he returned to his home in California. Oliver concludes this recording by talking about local political policies in Los Angeles and hopes the lockdown will end soon.