By: Austin Grimm

This semester has by far been one of the most stressful and eye-opening experiences of my life. Things started great! I started the semester fulfilling all of my passions: music, medicine, and coding. Music through my dorm room piano whenever I could, medicine through my Language of Medicine class, and coding through my cybersecurity class. Everything seemed to be going great. I mean, I was extremely stressed from my course load, but at least I was extremely happy at the same time. I even broke out of my comfort zone and made one of the best choices in my life, starting therapy. Going to the Student Development Center was unbelievable. I was able to let out all the stresses of my life including stress that I had almost all my life.


At this point, COVID was only in China and didn’t pose a true threat to the United States. Being in the medical field, I watched it closely, but I never thought the situation would be as critical as it is now. Life just kinda went on. The more I got into college, the happier I got. I thought nothing could stop this great moment. Then, COVID hit the US.


The moment I heard COVID was in Washington State, I knew it was only a matter of time. The countdown began until it reached the east coast. Day after day, week after week, it spread. Then, New York City. There were only days until it was at the University of Delaware.


Two days later, my home state, Maryland, was infected. The second I heard that Maryland was infected, I called my mom. She didn’t know about it at all, and within 30 minutes from that call, Maryland began shutting down. My focus and attention on schoolwork were destroyed. Every class turned into me watching the infection numbers climb. The next day, every state on the east coast except Delaware had a confirmed case of COVID. A couple of days later, Delaware was hit, and the University was immediately shutdown.


During all of those events, my mental state deteriorated immensely. By the time I reached my home in Maryland, I was a mess. My thought process was so clouded by COVID, my passions no longer became passions. Spring break saw the worst of me. The first week was spent virtually doing nothing and just watching everything collapse around me. The second week, my emotions hit me hard. Every day I was in tears just overwhelmed with everything going on. I didn’t want to go back to school online. I messed up a lot of relationships. I became submerged in stress and anxiety. Therapy wasn’t there anymore to help. I could not think about doing over the phone sessions, but nothing was helping. I think that week was the first time I hit a true depression.


The past month and a half of online work brought me back to reality. I’m still overwhelmed by everything, and not motivated in any way to do schoolwork. The reality of what I learned from this semester wasn’t a whole lot from the university itself. What I learned about was the beauty of human care and compassion. In the midst of all this chaos, beauty and hope bloomed. The way people have acted during this lockdown by striving to do their best to give something to help the community, showed the true compassion of humanity. So no, I didn’t learn much from this semester with regards to my education, I learned about the human side to humanity.

Addendum: Well everyone, we made it to the end of our second semester. I can’t say that this was exactly how I had thought it would end, but it certainly was an experience. I want to take this space as kinda the last goodbye. This class had a tremendous impact on me…when we were actually a class. Being able to just come into a room of 20ish people and just talk about big issues for an hour and fifteen minutes was unbelievable. I loved every minute of this class as we brought up some pretty big issues such as mental health on campus. In addition to all of that, I wrote my first piece of poetry earlier in the semester that came from my heart. I never have been passionate about writing or English class in general. Something about this class opened that up, and I cannot express how grateful I am. Never would I imagine that I would say “I love this English class”, but here I am saying..well, typing it. Thank you all for being amazing peers, I look forward to seeing you guys on campus, hopefully, next semester. Have a fantastic summer break!