I have always been a busy body, and college has turned me into a more social person than I ever was in high school. This year I moved out into my first apartment, got a job on campus with some of the best coworkers, and found a group of friends that I absolutely love. I never thought I could make friends in college like the best friends I had made in high school. But through my job, through all the in-service trainings at 6 in the morning and the closing shifts at midnight, I got really close to some of the coolest people I have ever met. In my spanish classes, I formed a group of friends with some of the nicest, funniest, most supportive people ever. My second year was shaping up to be my favorite part of college so far. And then one day in March, when I was studying for finals inside of Coffee Bean, I got an email saying that campus was closing starting the following Monday, and moving out of campus housing and apartments was strongly encouraged.
In one email, I had lost my job, I was told I had to move back home, and I would likely be seeing my friends for the last time, at least for the year. I went to my last shift that Sunday, and went home right after. I wrote all my final papers and took all my exams at home, and that next weekend I moved all of my stuff out of my apartment and turned in my keys. During my finals week and spring break, California was put under a stay home order, non essential businesses shut their doors, and beaches and national parks were closed. In 2 weeks I lost pretty much all semblance of what my life was.
While there are way more important and dire things happening than the loss of my social life, figuring out how to navigate human connection while being quarantined is essential to my sanity. A lot of our lives revolve around the relationships that we have formed, whether they be with friends, a significant other, professors, or anyone else important to you. In unprecedented times like these, it is even more important to stay close to the ones that you love, even if you can’t physically be close to them. Here are a few ways I have been staying connected to my people.
Your Professors
I don’t know about you guys, but I refused to forfeit the teacher-student relationship that I was familiar with in high school. I liked knowing that all my teachers knew who I was, and cared about how I was doing as an individual. In college, I put a lot of work into making sure I knew all of my professors personally, at least the ones in my major. I always sat in the first couple rows of the lecture hall, I was a regular at office hours, and actively participated in every discussion. Now, with Zoom replacing the traditional classroom experience, I can’t really do any of those things anymore. Remote learning forced me to get creative when trying to connect with professors. Now, I attend office hours via Skype, Google Hangout, and Zoom, it’s a little awkward, but it still allows me to get that one on one time with my professors that I want. I try to make a good impression and establish a good correspondence with my professors by emailing them interesting, relevant articles, and often that gets the conversation started. The important thing is to find a way to communicate with your professor that is comfortable for you, and allows you to expand your network the same way you would be meeting in person on campus.
Your Friends
Keeping in touch with friends is much easier. I utilized just about every app on my phone to connect with my friends on a daily basis before the quarantine. I can call, text, facetime, snap, and DM all of my friends. The hardest part is realizing how much I took seeing my friends everyday for granted. We did a lot of hanging out at restaurants, at the mall, or each other’s houses and apartments. Now that we can’t do any of that, we have to carve out time and put in extra effort to see and talk to each other. While my friend group from school can’t go get thai food weekly anymore, we can still study together and talk just as much as we would at school. My best friends from highschool have made it a habit to facetime each other once a week to catch up on everyone’s lives. One of my oldest best friends and I have started sending each other letters after we had to miss our annual friend-iversary date as just a way to switch up how we talk to each other. Waiting for a letter from her to come in the mail actually gives me something to look forward to during a time when there’s not a whole lot coming up.
Your Significant Other
I will admit, I have not been compliant with quarantine roles at all when it comes to spending time with my significant other. We have, of course, been extra careful about hanging out in person. We both wash our hands constantly, wash all our sheets if we sleep in each other’s beds, and disinfect all surfaces that we touch. If either of us feel any cold symptoms, even something as little as a stuffy nose, we wait 72 hours before seeing each other again. I am not advising you in any way, shape, or form to break quarantine, but if you are going to, please be extra careful. If an actual, strict quarantine gets put in place, my partner and I will do a lot of the same things we did when we were long distance. We used to have a lot of movie dates over facetime, and now there are apps that make that way easier. We set a schedule for when we would call and facetime, and spent more time throughout the day texting and snapping each other. It’s just important to figure out things that you like to do together that you can still enjoy when you’re not physically together. If you guys like cooking, find a recipe that you both can cook and have a virtual dinner date. If you guys are gym buddies, send each other Youtube workouts everyday that you guys can both do. You can still maintain some normalcy if you just think a little outside the box.
The point of all of this is, don’t let this quarantine isolate you from the people that are important to you. This technological era has made it extremely easy to stay social. Keep spending time with your friends, develop good relationships with your professors, and make your partner feel special, but most importantly, just stay safe.