pandemic

The class of 2021′s Commencement ceremony will be held online this April, the Commencement Office announced on its website today. The ceremony will take place on Friday, April 30, at 10:30 a.m.

As I return to Columbia from a semester off, I am confronted with the same jarring culture shock I experienced my first year—the experience of existing in a predominately white and wealthy institution while coming from a predominantly Black and poor community. Unlike many of my peers and many Black students who attend Columbia and other elite institutions, I didn’t attend a wealthy and white school nor was I raised in white picket-fenced suburbia. After spending my summer and fall in the predominantly Black and lower-income community of Crown Heights in Brooklyn, I return to Columbia with the same anxiety and feeling of foreignness.

Vocalizing stories about mental health can destigmatize seeking help and initiate honest discussions about these issues.

With a quick click of the “Leave Meeting” button, students return to the monotonous rhythm of life in a pandemic. Largely empty libraries are void of the whispers that used to echo off the walls. The silence is deafening.

As both parents and scientific researchers at Columbia, we are panicked by New York’s surging COVID-19 infection rates. Since March, no student has completely returned to school. Some students are in blended schooling—in person a few days a week—while others are learning fully remotely at home. Most after-school programs have not reopened since closing in March. The pandemic has led to serious scheduling and financial pressures on families with children, and uncertainty around when schools will open again makes it impossible to plan ahead. While some can afford to hire a nanny, many parents, and especially scientific researchers cannot.

As unrestful as 2020 has been, many of us spent much-needed time bonding with loved ones over food this Thanksgiving. But what about those whose financial capacity to provide and maintain adequate sustainable food has become worse during the pandemic? Food insecurity is an issue for many School of General Studies and graduate students, and poverty more broadly has been a major issue for many people of color in New York who were surviving from paycheck to paycheck pre-pandemic. The sudden loss of employment coupled with entrepreneurship-straining public health orders makes it even more difficult to pay bills and keep the same amount of food on the table as before. Unemployment compensation is a temporary benefit and is hardly enough money for many who are depending on it today. The recent surge in positive COVID-19 test results shows no sign of financial relief in sight, and opportunities for establishing sustainable economic independence continue to be scarce while living expenses remain the same.

Dating was hard even before a worldwide pandemic hit. With regulations on group gatherings and social distancing measures in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19, finding love now might feel impossible. If you’ve been feeling extra lonely this year, Spectrum created a guide to dating during the coronavirus.

In what would come to be known as one of the largest superspreader events of 2020, on the night of December 24, a man later identified as Santa Claus reportedly entered the homes of billions, unmasked.

My suitcase has seen better days. Its wheels are stiff and coarse; the handle pulls out only with considerable effort. There’s a large dent on its bottom, from the time when a Transportation Security Administration officer tossed it ungraciously off an airport conveyor belt. Stickers in varying states of disrepair adorn it: there’s a cat I found at a Bangkok night market; a torn orange doodle I bought from a thrift store in Rome; and a logo sticker from my old school that reads, a little too patriotically for my taste, “GO CHOATE!”