Fall is undoubtedly the best season, especially for a Queen’s student. If you look past midterms and impeding exams, you’ll see the leaves changing colours. It becomes the perfect temperature, where you can still get away without a jacket and the ability to walk outside while still maintaining feeling in all of your fingers and toes. October is particularly great because of the homecoming and Halloween festivities. But, as we all know, those things didn’t exactly happen this year. Being in first year during a global pandemic is definitely not how it used to be; in 1986, life as a Queen’s first-year student looked much different in the fall.
I asked my mom, a class of 1990 Queen’s grad, what fall was like back in her first year. She recalled homecomings where everyone was led from main campus to West by the Queen’s marching band via a road that was blocked off just for them. Everyone attended the football game in the daytime with copious amounts of purple dye and the classic coveralls. At night, there were parties in the ghetto, or everyone went to Alfie’s on campus (now called The Underground). During my mom’s first year, The Tragically Hip had just released their first album and were still the resident band at Alfie’s, so she and her friends spent a lot of time there (as one would if you got to see The Tragically Hip every night on your own campus).
While I’m doing all of my courses from my dorm room this year, I can’t help but wonder what it would be like if I were actually attending real, live classes. My mom recalls her first-year classes as being big and the workload as harder than she expected. Now that, I can relate to. She has one vivid memory of having to go to the computer lab in the bottom of Jeffery Hall every time she wanted to work on an assignment for her computer science class because that was the only place to access computers on campus. Today, we all have at least one computer in our rooms considering we physically would not be able to do university in this pandemic without our technology. We’re all so used to sitting in our rooms, at the same desk, day in and day out staring at that technology, but my mom can remember mostly studying in Douglas Library or with her friends in their dorm rooms in addition to going to their classes. Doing work in the same space I sleep, eat and relax feels so normal now, it’s hard to picture what it’d be like to venture out to lectures, the library or other study spots. Living vicariously through my mom’s stories has gotten me excited for coming years post-pandemic life, but I’m still grateful to even be at school in this crazy time. And, I’m thankful that I don’t have to trek out to Jeffery Hall every time I need to do work on a computer!
