Eye: features

Although students often spend Sunday nights alone, working on next week’s homework to make up for a weekend spent with friends, Matthew Wang, Columbia College junior and president of the Columbia eSports team, spends the night on Discord with more than 200 other members. At first glance, the server may seem quiet—nobody is constantly chatting or playing music when in fact, everyone is immersed in gaming as shown in their profiles: League of Legends and Overwatch scrimmages, or their nightly game of Minecraft or Hearthstone.

In July, Nanette DiLauro, Barnard’s director of financial aid, wrote to students who received financial aid and had participated in the housing lottery in the spring semester. She informed them that they were eligible to receive a financial aid award of $7,846 to support off-campus room and board as a part of the campus reopening plans.

When Jenna Gould answers my phone call, it is with an apology. She is holding her baby as we speak, and while she believes that he won’t make too much of a fuss over the course of the next thirty minutes, she’s sorry in advance if he does. I hear a sleepy murmur behind her voice—the hushed kind that only a child nestling into his mother’s arms makes—and then he falls quiet, just as Gould predicted.

While walking through the streets of Manhattan, Harlem resident and Columbia College first-year Zenayah Roaché comments, “It’s like a whole different world. When you go up the blocks, you enter this world much where everything is separated, so now you continue to live in this ‘story.’”

You can see it coming from miles away. It starts with a jutting motion of the arms into the air above their head. Then their fingers sprawl in five directions and their palms become white with enthusiasm. A flurry of tiny steps follow, and grow progressively faster as they near you until, finally, along with a squeal of joy, their arms swoop around your sides, wrapping you up snuggly, and their chin digs deep into your shoulder.

“Uncertainty is a motif of my life,” Columbia College first-year Derek Ng tells me, one evening over Zoom. 

When Columbia switched to online instruction in March, Eduardo Vergara Torres’ computer died. His aging laptop could not handle the bombardment of videoconferencing, and he could not afford to fix or replace it. Normally, this would be a major inconvenience for a Spanish instructor and second-year Ph.D. candidate in Latin American and Iberian cultures—but in a world transformed by COVID-19, a broken computer spelled catastrophe.

It’s 10 p.m. on a Friday night, do you have plans? A couple Friday nights ago, Yuval Dinoor, a Barnard College junior, threw a “PowerPoint party”—over Zoom, of course.

For many students, the transition to taking classes online on Zoom has upturned what it means to be at a university. Many op-eds and columns have been written about the negative impacts of the coronavirus outbreak—be that personal loss, stress about job security, or a generalized feeling of loneliness. The pandemic has deeply impacted how students interact with each other, both in and outside the classroom.