EXPERIENCE
AUTHOR: SARAH EXNER PHOTOGRAPHER: SYDNEY HOLZKNECHT It’s 10 a.m. on a brisk Tuesday morning. Campus is bustling with faint murmurs of acquainted classmates walking through the MU quad. You were up late studying for your midterm the night before, and the nerves begin to set in as you can see the building you’re walking to in the far distance. Beep beep beep. The sound of reality hits and your alarm startles you up for your remote class starting in less than ten minutes. You jump up in a panic, throw on the first shirt you can find from your closet and open your laptop in preparation for the next few hours of Zoom. While listening to your professor through the computer screen, your mind can’t help but begin to wander. What is now a dream used to be an everyday mundane college routine. If there is one thing we can confidently say the world has learned, it’s never take things for granted. Live life in the moment, and be grateful for things like a routine filled with normality.
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We’ve all gone through hardships this last year. We’ve all laughed, we’ve all cried and we’ve all had days where getting out of bed seems impossible. A world we once knew feels out of reach. One way of gauging how different this thing we call life now is, is to hear the perspective of students who are ending their educational career amidst a global pandemic. Erin Schuh, a soon to be college graduate from Oregon State University studying Human Development Family Science, knows this concept quite well as she begins to end this chapter in her life. It’s been very hard for her and her friends to accept the fact that she was quite literally cheated out of her senior year in college. “It is a hard feeling to describe being a senior in college graduating in a few weeks,” she said, “I do not feel as prepared as I once hoped as I begin to enter the real world”
