Last week, my sister, an incoming first-year student at UNC, wrote an op-ed about how COVID-19 is affecting the class of 2024. As an undergraduate myself, I know how important your first year is. From the moment you step on campus for the first time, to the feeling of relief after you turn in your last final exam, the experience from start to finish informs your entire UNC experience.
As that experience becomes increasingly uncertain for the class of 2024, I can only offer my sympathies in response. I know how unimaginably worrying it might be to have your college experience threatened. Many of us are experiencing it ourselves, though the consequences vary from class to class.
Your first year is widely seen as a fresh start. As newly minted 'adults,' you get the rare opportunity to reinvent yourselves away from your hometown. New friends, new experiences, new classes and new rooms — everything is new and exciting. The uniqueness of each day, especially towards the beginning, fills everyone with an energy and sense of wonder that is hard to come by once routine sets in. It is a powerful feeling, and not many will forget it.
Those unique experiences fundamentally change us. The person who walks the stage at high school graduation is not the same that steps out of their first-year dorm for the last time. This is by design, and anyone who has listened to their parents reminisce about college knows this. Still, there is a certain wistful quality to reflecting on the thousands of little idiosyncrasies that came together to create a new person.
This is not to say everyone has an unambiguously positive first year at UNC. The experiences of adjustment, of fitting in, of comparing yourself to your peers are as much a part of your first year as are the wonder and excitement. Sometimes the first-year experience means crying at 3 a.m., stricken with homesickness. Unfortunately, there’s no way to predict when and why these problems arise. Part of the experience is playing the cards that are dealt, even if the hand itself is staggeringly unfair.
Among unfair cards, the class of 2024 has been dealt a unique one, to put it lightly. To have the prospect of first-year classes being online, to miss out on awkward move-in day small talk, to have the elevator pitch of the “Carolina Experience” be potentially taken from them at such short notice is unthinkable.
Perhaps the hardship that the class of 2024 experiences will be unique and universal all at once. They might be faced with a college experience that is unique to them, even though everyone fought through the COVID-19 pandemic. That uniqueness is scary, yet somehow it also makes their first year unifying. In ways that my first year wasn’t, the hardships of the class of 2024 may be so commonly felt that they can lean on each other for support in ways that other incoming classes couldn't. Paradoxically, social distancing may create a stronger community than ever before.
No one can say for sure what the class of 2024 will experience next year. Hopefully, they are able to experience the full variety of all that first year has to offer — the joys, hardships, community and individual growth, the victories and the defeats. In the absence of a 'typical' first year, they may be presented with something different, yet not entirely without value. When all has seemed to crumble in the face of COVID-19, there may yet be opportunities to rebuild and thrive as a community. Here’s hoping that my sister, and the entire class of 2024, can do just that!
