One year of COVID

Emerson College’s student newspaper since 1947 • berkeleybeacon.com

Thursday, March 18, 2021 • Volume 74, Issue 21

ONE YEAR LATER

@berkeleybeacon // @beaconupdate

A pandemic-battered campus still reeling On the moment everything changed Charlie McKenna Beacon Staff

March 2021

Six Emerson students, now a year into a first-in-a-century pandemic, recalled the moments when they realized life was not going to return to “normal” anytime soon.

For some, that moment came quickly—when President M. Lee Pelton moved classes online on March 10, 2020 and then told students to leave their residence halls just three days later, for example. For others, it took months of living at home to comprehend their new reality.

Sophomore writing, literature, and publishing major Anna Phillips said the distorted reality of the pandemic set in for her when she received an email from her volleyball coach in mid-July informing her the team’s pre-season would be canceled. “[When I found out we weren’t having a season I was like] ‘well this is going to be very, very weird,’ because I’m already a homebody when I stay at home, but not being able to play volleyball kind of skewed my plans,” she said.

Phillips said when she received Pelton’s community-wide email last March, she assumed the pandemic would be short-lived.

“I was upset that we had to leave, obviously, but I was like, ‘Okay, I’m sure over the summer, things will die down, we’ll flatten the curve enough

that we can go back and everything will be fine,’” she said. “When that didn’t happen I was like, ‘What? what do you mean?’”

Sophomore Christopher Dang, a fellow athlete, said his life was thrown off-kilter when he learned the men’s soccer team’s fall season was canceled.

The team’s coach broke the news to the team in a July meeting, which he said helped soften the blow of the disappointing announcement.

Sophomore visual and media arts major Giovanna Maralishvilli said the realization struck her when she returned to the Boston campus from spring break and learned of Harvard University’s decision to shut down. That news, coupled with her mother’s insistence that she bring hand sanitizer wherever she went while home, served as the warning of abnormality hiding around the corner.

“I remember all my friends and I were like, ‘Oh shit I think we’re getting sent home—something’s gonna go down,’” she said. “Then, sure enough, I was watching something in one of my friend’s rooms, and we got a message in our group chat saying Emerson’s announcing that they’re going to let people have the option to go home now, and we’re like ‘Holy shit.’”

Maralishvilli said that moment, compounded with the cancelation of many activities—like a marching band parade for alumni at her high school—prompted her to realize the gravity of the transformation.

Ian McClure, a sophomore VMA student, said the country’s increasing case and death totals throughout the summer Instant, Pg. 4

Come fall, a return Coping with the to normalcy? historic loss of life Josh Sokol

Camilo Fonseca

Beacon Staff

Beacon Staff

While scrolling through Twitter—a passive and frequent pandemic pastime—I’ll see tweets along the lines of “We survived 2020; that’s something to celebrate.”

While of course, that is something worth celebrating, I can’t help but think of the grand scale of losses from the past year.

What of those that did not survive 2020?

Those lives who were cut short from a pandemic and neglected by a government who believed COVID would just “blow over.”

What of those who lost loved ones and are still reeling from the grief?

Since the pandemic began a full year ago, 2,620,416 people across the globe have died as a result of the virus. A number which, when put into words, makes the pandemic seem more concrete and visible.

It’s a number without a physical representation, the human brain cannot fathom two million people. The deaths in the United States alone make up 540,297 of that two million, 21 percent of all COVID-related deaths.

Each of those individual deaths matter, and each of those deaths have a name, a Grief, Pg. 8

OPINION

11 students.

11 majors.

11 stories.

Pg. 6-7

March 2020

Public health experts say there appears to be a “light at the end of the tunnel” shining for college campuses after a year of restrictions, social distancing, and online learning—but warn that administrators and students are not yet out of the woods.

The college announced its plan to continue the hybrid model into the fall semester on Feb. 22—allowing for a possible “shift” to fully in-person classes should the conditions of the pandemic allow. Beyond that, though, it is unclear what the college landscape will look like in the fall.

“Barring any unforeseen circumstances, I do think that things can get pretty much back to normal by the fall,” said Dr. Michael Siegel, a public health researcher at the Boston University School of Public Health.

“Exactly how normal, I’m not sure.”

Emerson has not yet determined whether other aspects of its coronavirus safety policy, like twice-weekly testing, social distancing, and restrictions on public gatherings, will also be carried into in the fall term, Experts, Pg. 7

INSIDE THIS EDITION Letter from the Editor: Reflecting After a Year Pg. 2 The logistical, engagement issues with Zoom school Pg. 2

The pandemic wrought havoc on education Pg. 8 How COVID-19 affect Boston’s museum Pg. 11

Staff continue pushing for benefits return Pg. 3

I’m lucky sports are the worst thing I lost Pg. 12

Represents key dates in COVID-19 timeline COVID-19 timeline continues on Pg. 2 and 3 Diti Kohli / Beacon Staff

News Letter from the Editor Katie Redefer The past 12 months may have been the most unprecedented year of our lifetime. The first pandemic in a century transformed life as we knew it in more ways than I can name, forcing us to confront the fragility of the world we live in. The answer to when the pandemic will end—if at all—became increasingly distant. Millions lost their lives in the process, and many more will.

Despite the gut-wrenching losses, the endlessly gruesome headlines, and the days when we feared our world would simply implode, we persevered. Essential workers risked their lives to provide for their communities, protesters demanded justice for the killing of George Floyd and countless other Black Americans, and scientists created a COVID-19 vaccine within an unbelievably short timeline.

And at The Beacon, we kept doing what we love—reporting. From March 2020 to now, we’ve published more than 1,100 stories, working tirelessly to provide the Emerson community with the reporting it deserves.

After this year, it could not be clearer to me that reporting is an essential service.

The past year has been historic in many ways, but especially for Emerson. Never in the college’s history had they been forced to

shut their doors mid-semester, scattering students across the globe, only to reopen under an unprecedented hybrid learning plan that radically altered our college experiences.

Amid this all, President Pelton announced his departure after 10 years at the college, the merger with Marlboro College merger was finalized, administrators issued a new, 81page Title IX policy, and students’ concerns about racial inequity within the college are seemingly being confronted by administration after years of student advocacy.

Through it all, The Beacon was there, publishing online nearly every day. In the process, we confronted injustices within our own newsroom, questioning traditional journalistic practices that previously went unchecked. We realized something crucial— if we are not serving all of our community fairly, then we are not fulfilling our true purpose. I could not be more proud of the changes we’ve instituted, like our advisory board that oversees sensitive content, regular, professional bias training, as well as altering our ethics training, among numerous other changes. Change is a process, but it’s something we are whole-heartedly dedicated to.

The Beacon is far from perfect. As students who are still learning the ropes of journalism, we’ve often made mistakes. I’m certain we will make many more; this doesn’t mean we should throw in the towel. Students, faculty, parents, staff, alumni, and the entire

The Berkeley Beacon

March 18, 2021

community, deserve an accessible and comprehensive source of news. Those who look back on 2020 in 10 years, or a hundred, deserve a well-documented report of the pandemic’s effect on Emerson. I say confidently that I believe we have achieved these goals, soaring above my prior expectations.

The past year was an important marker in our digital revolution. We saw more than 300,000 users and 680,000 page views to our website in the last 12 months. February 2021 was our best month on record for average daily engagement, up 204 percent from February 2020. Our audience spent more time reading stories than ever before, up 156 percent over the same time last year. We’re grossing more engaged readers that keep coming back for more of our content.

Throughout this hellish year, we’ve reported nonstop, and hundreds of thousands of people are listening. This responsibility is not lost on me, which is why in the next several days, we plan to publish dozens of stories reflecting on a year of the pandemic.

I hope you, dear reader, will take the time to read them.

I look forward to the stories that lie ahead and the many dumpster fires I expect to encounter in the process. I want to thank our incredibly talented and dedicated staff for working tirelessly to bring you this 12-page special edition of The Berkeley Beacon, reflecting on one year of the pandemic.

Twelve months in ‘Zoom University’ Online learning brings logistical, engagement issues Frankie Rowley & Alec Klusza Beacon Staff A year into pandemic, professors—forced to straddle the two modalities of hybrid learning— say the new form has proven onerous, while others have learned to work around its constraints.

Last March, after all classes moved online and campus shuttered, administrators and faculty raced to improvise a makeshift online learning experience for the remainder of the spring semester. For the following two semesters, as hybrid learning became the status quo, some professors repeatedly faced the same roadblocks: student disengagement, safety concerns, and technology shortcomings.

Despite some students and faculty saying they are dissatisfied with Emerson’s hybrid learning model, the college has seen an increase in the cumulative grade point average reported by students since the onset of the pandemic. For the spring and fall 2020 semesters, both graduates and undergraduates earned slightly higher GPAs than they did in 2019, according to Assistant Vice President of Institutional Research Michael Duggan. In fall 2020, the cumulative undergraduate GPA was 3.58, .3 percent higher than fall 2019.

This trend is unsurprising, according to Jim Stephens, a design and technology coach for Mapleton Public Schools in Denver, Colorado, who said the pandemic has affected the “emotional side” of learning more than the academic side.

“There actually hasn’t been a really significant shift or drop [in literacy, numeracy, and mathematics] because of online learning,” Stephens said. “We’ve actually seen the biggest decrease in engagement satisfaction. Students are feeling really disengaged from the learning and from each other.”

Despite this, Stephens said many professors feel disillusioned with the implementation of pandemic learning, which has affected student engagement in the classroom.

“Teachers and professors are like ‘This is not what I signed up for. I’m not trained to do this,’” Stephens said. “They feel incredibly inferior in terms of ‘I’m no longer able to meet the needs [of students] and to express my passion for teaching and learning and research that I used to.’”

According to a survey conducted in November 2020 by Institutional Research of 273 Emerson faculty members, 21 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed that “the quality of work I see from my students is roughly comparable to what I’ve seen in the past, pre-COVID-19, compared

Undergraduates and graduate GPAs increased slightly this year. Hongyu Liu / Beacon Staff

to the 60 percent agreed or strongly agreed.

Fewer were satisfied with the quality of faceto-face class discussions or group projects—but 72 percent were generally or very satisfied with Zoom discussions and 76 percent with students completing online collaborative projects.

But sometimes, the barriers to online teaching are logistical ones; 14 percent did not have a computer able to run all their programs and applications needed without freezing up or running slowly, and 35 percent reported taking care of others during the time they worked, the survey reported. 12 percent did not have a reliable internet connection.

Performing Arts Professor Holly Tarnowner, who primarily teaches improvisation classes, said her philosophies as an educator had to change due to the pandemic.

“When it all hit, it was very shocking,” Tarnowner said. “It was a new world. I’m not really the most tech-savvy, and my teaching style and philosophies are very holistic and classroom practice-based. It was a very weird transition.”

Tarnowner said she gradually learned how to make her classes a more immersive experience.

“The great thing about teaching improv and doing improv is that it’s improvised,” Tarnowner said. “You get to move naturally with the class and what’s happening. With improv, it’s a little easier because improv games are pretty easily formatted to [online].”

Brooke Knisley, a professor in the writing, literature, and publishing department, said her classes have fared better online than in person due to the reading and writing-based format.

“I always offer a recording so they can revisit the lectures when we do meet,” Knisley said.

“Online learning offers accommodations that they [might] need but don’t have readily available when we’re in person—I think the internet space

definitely makes up for that.”

Knisley, who is disabled and immunocompromised, has taught online-only classes since the start of the pandemic. She said she doesn’t think the college considered student’s safety enough when developing the hybrid model.

“If Emerson had the safety concern of students in mind when it came to the Fall 2020 semester, they would have moved everything online and put funds and resources into making the online experience more enriching and fulfilling,” Knisley said. “Instead, [we’re] doing this weird Frankenstein hybrid where no one really wins.”

Professor Joshua Way said one of his primary goals in teaching introductory speech communication is to build a community within the class.

“That’s really difficult when you’re switching modalities every other class,” Way said. “In my classes, I’ve seen people actually talk to each other before class starts. Students get to know each other, maybe they’re even friends or something. I love seeing that. I really made a point in the fall semester to … take the time to make sure everybody’s okay. That’s not necessarily my responsibility, but sometimes [for students] it’s nice to know that somebody cares.”

Way, a fervent adversary of Zoom learning, said the atmosphere of online learning is as uncomfortable as talking to a television.

“It’s very difficult to see subtle visual cues and body language cues from people—you just see their face, you don’t hear anything,” he said.

“When it’s just your voice in silence for an extended amount of time it’s weird because you’re getting absolutely no feedback. You’re just staring at faces on the screen. [And] it’s really hard to stay engaged when somebody’s talking at you that way.” contact@berkeleybeacon.com

Represents key dates in COVID-19 timeline COVID-19 timeline continued from Pg. 1 Diti Kohli / Beacon Staff

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March 18, 2021

3

Overworked staff fight for recognition Benefit restoration still among chief concerns

Ann E. Matica & Camilo Fonseca Beacon Staff

With inflated workloads, slashed benefits, and continuing tense negotiations with Emerson, college staff members are nearing a breaking point—after more than a year of sacrifice forced by the pandemic.

Emerson staff members—both the 1,210 directly employed by the college and its third-party vendors—quickly shifted their focus to provide the community with safe classrooms, educational resources, and food in their stomachs when the college abruptly moved classes online last March. Since then, they have worked relentlessly to keep the college running behind-the-scenes.

After the campus abruptly closed, the staff union negotiated with college administrators to prevent staff layoffs for the duration of the fall semester. In return, staff members agreed to take benefit cuts and forfeit all raises to combat the projected $33-76 million COVID-19 related losses over the 2021 fiscal year.

Since December, the union has made a push to get back some of the sacrifices—like benefit cuts and a raise freeze—they made in an effort to assist the college’s financial standing and preserve their jobs, Staff Union Chair Dennis Levine said. Now that Emerson is anticipating a “best-case scenario” financial loss of $30 million, slightly below initial predictions, Levine said the reinstatement of staff benefits is due.

“We have to start worrying about things that are going to happen next semester,” Levine said. “Our members have lots of concerns, financially we’re helping the school, but the school is not really doing us any favors.”

In the union’s 2018 collective bargaining agreement, staff are guaranteed an annual 3.9 percent raise. However, with the pandemic continuing to decimate staff members’ finances. Levine said it has become more imperative employees receive immediate monetary relief.

In that collective bargaining agreement, the staff union fought for a “sick bank,” where employees can donate

Staff members around campus work as tap desk guards, IT, and sanitary workers. Hongyu Liu, Zhuoli Zhang / Beacon Staff

paid sick days to other staff who may have used up theirs. This program— which Staff Union Vice-Chair Shaylin Hogan said the college fought fervently against—has proven essential during the pandemic.

“People may have lost their second job and now all of a sudden you’re out sick and you have no vacation time or sick time left,” Levine said. “How are you supposed to support your family, are you supposed to pay your bills and keep the heat?”

Administrators have given them no indication during negotiations when this raise, among other benefits, will be restored.

“They say we might be flexible, we might be changing, but there hasn’t been any kind of promise or anything like that,” Hogan said.

“That’s really hard to hear when we know that we’ve kept the school going this long without having to be on campus all the time.”

Vice President for Administration and Finance Paul Dworkis said in a November faculty forum outlining the college’s tentative positive financial outlook that reinstating benefits was premature.

“We are too early in the fiscal year to be able to consider reinstating retirement contributions or pay raises,” Dworkis said. “I want to thank the College’s staff and faculty unions for their partnership in establishing the cost-cutting measures that have helped us project jobs.”

Along with the financial sacrifices, staff also gave up two-and-a-half days of vacation time. This week, the college granted each staff member two va-

cation days that can be taken between March 22 and April 30, contingent on the approval of department managers.

“We can only use them during what is, for most people, the busiest part of the year, not just the semester but the whole year,” Hogan said. “I know it is very unlikely that I would be able to effectively use those days off for vacation because if I take a day off the next day, I still have to do all of my work for the day and the day before.”

The staff union doesn’t afford protection to third-party staff, such as Emerson’s food service workers, who are hired through food management company Bon Appétit. Yet the pandemic forced them to adapt to an entirely new approach towards cooking, serving, and cleaning.

One Dining Center worker, who spoke through an interpreter on the con-

dition of anonymity, described taking time off at the beginning of the pandemic—before the college announced its shut down on March 13—and said she only returned because of the college’s rigorous testing program and safety protocols.

Despite being vaccinated, the anonymous worker said her concerns over COVID caused her to limit her workdays at the Dining Center to three a week. The anxiety-inducing effect of the virus, she said, is just as psychological as it is physical.

“People don’t feel well even if they don’t have it,” she said. “The first thing the virus attacks is the nerves.”

Facilities management Crew Chief John Vanderpol said the disastrous state of the resident halls—filled with trash left by students rushing to leave in the spring—forced staffers to work nearly the entire summer to sanitize them. Now, Vanderpol’s responsibilities include sanitizing dorm rooms in Paramount with a Clorox 360 machine after students who test positive move out.

“We know which rooms in the Paramount are positive cases, they give us the minimum of 24 hours or more, where they get out to go back to their dorm,” Vanderpol said. “We know that everything we’re touching or breathing, there’s a risk.”

Vanderpol said he worried about bringing the virus home to his family.

“Every day since March, so it’s always a thought, all the time,” he said.

“But the college, they were very good at guiding. It seemed very organized.”

Electronic Resource Coordinator and Reference Librarian Daniel Crocker said straddling the pandemic with his personal life has been a major challenge.

“The biggest source of stress is what do I do with my kid,” Crocker said. “The fact that we had to make the sacrifice— everyone who made it understood it. We do feel a little deceived about those raises. Some unions on campus got a raise and some didn’t. But the financial strain of the pandemic is the least stressful part.

Money is tight. It was tight before. it’s always been a little tight at Emerson.” contact@berkeleybeacon.com

By the numbers » College sees lower pandemic losses than expected Andrew Brinker Beacon Staff

Expected losses: $33 million - $100 million Total losses: $30 million

The past year, dominated by an unrelenting pandemic, has been marked by resounding loss. More than 500,000 have died in the U.S. alone—that toll’s reverberation through families of those claimed by the virus may be a cost forever immeasurable.

Measurable though, at least in part, is the financial decimation that has underscored the human loss, and may live on for years to come. COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on the U.S. economy, delivering unprecedented job loss and hammering industries of all sizes.

To Emerson, it has presented perhaps the greatest financial challenge in its 141-year history.

For an institution already sitting on shaky financial ground (Emerson’s endowment comes in at around $180 million, which pales in comparison to other schools of its size), it appears administrators have, so far, successfully negotiated what could have been a monetary disaster.

In June, President M. Lee Pelton offered a sobering prediction—administrators foresaw between $33 and $76 million—and up to $100 million—in pandemic-related losses over the upcoming fiscal year (June 2020 through June 2021).

It was a shocking reality check, and a reflection of an industry completely unprepared to survive a virus that requires educational flexibility and physical separation.

“Although demand for an Emerson education has never been greater… Emerson is not immune to the deleterious effects that the pandemic has had on the financial health of colleges across the country,” Pelton wrote in

ANALYSIS

a letter to faculty.

The college had already incurred around $8 million in losses when they issued students a housing refund for spring 2020, according to recent financial statements, though those losses were offset by cost-cutting measures taken up in the summer.

Now, administrators predict the total losses for fiscal year 2021 have dwindled to $30 million—still a significant hit, but perhaps a more manageable one. Vice President for Administration and Finance Paul Dworkis referred to the loss as “the best case scenario” in a November faculty and staff forum.

There’s no telling if Emerson could have recovered from the worst case scenario.

College officials have not indicated what exactly makes up the $30 million in projected losses, but it’s fair to point to a few main culprits: the massive effort to retrofit campus with plexiglass, the twice-weekly testing program that costs upwards of $5 million a semester, lost room and board costs from those studying online, and a loss in auxiliary services revenue (money the college earns through its theaters and other programs).

“If [fiscal year 2020] were only remembered for the modest, yet meaningful, positive financial result we accomplished, it would belie the truly remarkable achievement of successfully navigating a once-ina-century COVID-19 pandemic,” Pelton wrote in his annual state of the college address in November.

But navigating the pandemic has come at a steep price for community members, in the form of cost-cutting measures that have hit faculty and staff hard and left students with a higher bill.

Staff forfeited annual salary increases as well as annual retirement contributions from the college over the summer after warnings from administrators of massive losses. Some

staff members told The Beacon in December they hoped to receive those benefits back after the college reported a strong fiscal outlook, but administrators have indicated no such plans.

Officials also hiked tuition by two percent for the 2020-21 academic year, though in communication to students, they repeatedly emphasized that it was less than the normal increase of four percent. The difference saved students roughly $2,500 on their annual bill. (Emerson relies heavily on tuition and room and board dollars, which make up 89 percent of their annual revenue.)

Still, Emerson avoided staff and faculty

layoffs, which plagued institutions around the country that found themselves in multimillion dollar holes related to the pandemic. Boston University, for example, laid off 250 employees over the summer in response to $94 million in economic fallout.

“We’ve been guided by acting in a humane and fiscally responsible way, trying to distribute reductions as responsibly as possible, and avoiding cuts that would damage the institution and long term health, or the academic mission,” Dworkis said at a faculty forum in June. andrew_brinker@emerson.edu

The instant the world ‘ended’ Cont. from Pg. 1 months made him confront the long-lasting nature of the pandemic.

“After two, three months in when the cases started coming up, increasing throughout the months … they kept on rising,” McClure said. ”There was no sign of opening back the borders or getting in touch with normal. It didn’t seem like things were gonna go back to normal anytime soon.”

Students who attended Kasteel Well in the spring got an indication of the new reality lurking around the corner just days before students on the Boston campus were faced with the rapidly changing world. Anna Bohman, a junior marketing communications major, said getting sent home from the Boston campus just days after being sent home from the castle is what made her realize “normal” life was rapidly fading away.

“When we got sent home from the castle I really didn’t think … COVID would last this

long,” she said. “When I was sent home home and I saw Harvard and every single school in the country and around the world [sent kids home] that’s when I was like, ‘Oh man, this is serious.’”

That moment came even faster for junior Rodin Batcheller, a journalism major. He said as the threat of the coronavirus crept ever closer in late February, the prospect of being sent back home to Boston grew very real.

When the announcement finally came that students would be sent back to the U.S., he was unsurprised.

“It wasn’t a surprise, I was half expecting it,” he said. “The first thing that popped into my head was, ‘Well, I’m kind of upset that I don’t get to stay. But if this thing is as bad as what I read about, then I’m glad the school is getting ahead of the ball and making sure that students are safe.’” charlie_mckenna@emerson.edu

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A mountain of hurdles and losses

For graduating seniors Frankie Rowley Beacon Staff

The view of Boylston St. from The Little Building. Chris Van Buskirk / Beacon Staff

For the class of 2024 Camilo Fonseca & Frankie Rowley Beacon Staff

Many students anticipate their first year of college as a milestone—their initial steps onto campus marking a momentous transition between adolescence into adulthood.

Emerson’s class of 2024, however, is weathering a year they’ve described as anything but traditional.

At the beginning of the fall 2020 semester, incoming first-year students experienced a campus markedly different from those before them. The world of hybrid learning, mask mandates, and social-distancing policies marked a far cry from what many students imagined college would look like.

“This year, coming here during the pandemic, the transition was so weird,” journalism major Morgan Gaffney said. “It was nothing like what I expected—and I think I definitely miss [what I expected].”

For first years, the college experience was different as soon as they arrived on campus.

Instead of the memorable orientation process—sitting in the Cutler Majestic Theatre, shaking Lee Pelton’s hand, and watching orientation leader dances—they sat through their move-in quarantine period on Zoom.

“There was no proper orientation or way to meet people,” Jake Tannenbaum, a visual and media arts major, said. “It’s a very odd situation just because we missed that. The whole point of orientation, in general, is that it sucks, and then you find people who hate it as much as you do and you become lifelong friends.”

Tannenbaum and others said the pandemic’s most apparent effects came in their social life. The in-person organization fair, where most students can interact with members of different clubs, was moved online. Many in-person extracurricular activities were suspended, fraternity and sorority life paused recruitment, and classes were forced online or into the hybrid model—shutting off various outlets for those freshmen that came to college alone.

“Two of my siblings have already gone to college, and right off the bat, they were meeting people and going places—they could do so much,” Gaffney said. “For us, that’s not really an option. You do meet people, and you do make friends, but it’s so much more hindered.”

Gaffney, like most of her peers, was denied much of her senior year of high school, as the pandemic forced the cancelation of various long-awaited events like senior prom and in-person graduation ceremonies.

“There were a lot of things I was looking forward to,” Megan Riley, who has not declared a major, said. “They are never going to happen because of the pandemic.”

Luke Colombero, a theatre and performance major, said he hoped—in vain—that his first year of college would have been different from the experience during his abridged senior year.

“With COVID, the same thing is happening in college,” he said. “You can’t hang out with anyone, can’t have [the] get-togethers we all wanted to have with our close friends.

It’s just devastating.”

The pandemic prevented many freshmen from touring the college before they arrived in

the fall. Colombero, who hails from Los Angeles, said the prospect of moving to Boston was totally foreign to him.

“I didn’t know what it was going to be like,” Colombero said. “I only heard about [Emerson] through a friend of mine who’s a sophomore now—she gave rave reviews. But I didn’t know what Boston was going to be like. I didn’t know it was going to be windy 24/7. I wasn’t expecting that.”

Nevertheless, students like Riley said their time at Emerson has proven to be a relief from the stresses of the first months of the global shutdown.

“I feel like [my first year] has been the only real thing I’ve had in the pandemic,” Riley said, “When graduation was online, it felt fake, when all our senior events were online, they didn’t feel tangible—whereas moving to Boston was super real.”

Riley said she channelled her “pent-up disappointment” from her senior year to focus on creating the best first-year college experience she could.

“It was cathartic to have had a really great first-year experience,” Riley said. “I know that there are students here who didn’t have an easy time finding friends or didn’t like their roommate. But for me, within the first two weeks, I had met the same friends that I have now—[my roommates and I] are besties.

It felt kind of healing to have something real in 2020.”

Emerson saw 13,237 applications during 2020, a 14 percent decrease from 2019, according to the Emerson College Factbook.

The yield rate—the number of accepted applicants who end up enrolling—held steady compared to recent years. The drop in applications came as no surprise, said Michael Lynch, director of undergraduate admissions.

“We feel [the pandemic has created] the opportunity to rethink the college search process and all of those things that factor into students minds as they make decisions,” Lynch said. “We were planning for any number of outcomes—though we would like to see the overall application numbers rebound after the pandemic.”

Gaffney said she considered deferring their acceptances until the pandemic subsided, part of a trend identified by The Boston Globe of an uptick in students accepted to Boston-area colleges choosing to take a gap year.

“I was super close to deferring, but at the last minute, I was like, ‘I’m just gonna do it,’” Gaffney said. “And I’m glad I did.”

Despite the unexpected trials and tribulations of their transition, for many first-years, the pandemic developed them in ways college alone could not.

“I really feel I’ve matured in a way I never would have without COVID,” Colombero said. “I definitely am more secure with myself as a person [than I was] pre-COVID. Now that I’m here, a lot of my friends can attest that I’ve definitely changed a lot…

COVID has really changed how a lot of people are growing up.” contact@berkeleybeacon.com

For the second year in a row, Emerson will hold an online commencement ceremony in May, slashing a ritual many recent and upcoming graduates anticipated as a time of closure and celebration.

The virtual ceremony is set to be held during May’s “Emerson Week,” an initiative announced in early March intended to honor Emerson traditions remotely. In addition to 2021 graduates, there will be a celebration of the class of 2020, whose commencement originally set to be online, was postponed last July.

“The challenge we have is that class has already dispersed,” Jim Hoppe, vice president and dean of campus life, said. “Even trying to contact them is more challenging… but we’re going to try to do everything we can to make it meaningful for both classes.”

Hoppe said switching to an in-person ceremony at this point is highly unlikely due to the meticulous planning of an event of that size and Emerson’s sports complex, Rotch Field, being unsuitable to fit the graduating class with state-mandated distance requirements.

Commencement is typically held at Boston University’s Agganis Arena—as of March 22, arenas will be permitted to reopen in the state at 12 percent capacity, which for Agganis would be just over 850 attendees.

“It’s not the kind of thing you can just kind of flip a switch and pivot on quickly,” Hoppe said. “Most of the larger venues that are open to the public haven’t been willing to [have] reservations for groups that size, a decision of what is going to happen [had to be made].”

Other Boston-area colleges, like Boston University and Northeastern University, plan to hold in-person commencement ceremonies. Northeastern plans to split their graduating class in half and hold two ceremonies, both at Fenway Park. Boston University plans to restrict attendance for the Nickerson Field ceremony to “graduating seniors and advanced degree recipients and a small platform party, including deans, administrators, and honorary degree recipients.”

For seniors experiencing their last months at the college as the pandemic continues, losing commencement was devastating. Senior comedic arts major James Richardson said it felt “like a gut punch.”

“This school has moved mountains before [and] done incredible things,” Richardson said. “I just can’t help but feel that Emerson only strived to have that many in-person classes to avoid the complaints of ‘We should be charged less because it’s all online.’ Since there’s no complaints relating to graduation in that way, they’re like ‘We don’t have to try.’”

Sam Willinger, a senior visual and media arts major, said he was particularly disappointed because of the effort he put in to graduate college at all.

“I wasn’t supposed to go to college,” Willinger said. “I have a learning disability [and] was told I would never graduate high school.

For me, this is a big deal to have gone to a

college, gotten into a school and now subsequently graduating after doing a lot here.”

Richardson said the abrupt cancelation made him feel as if he were being “cut loose” by the college.

“The fact that they can’t even try to give us in-person graduation or postpone it [is] really frustrating and leaves a bitter aftertaste in my mouth,” he said.

For the class of 2020, the loss of graduation was the culmination of a turbulent senior year of confusion and cancellations.

Brett Boon, a VMA graduate, said he felt a lack of closure following his online commencement in December.

“I feel like I got kicked off Emerson and I haven’t been allowed to be back,” Boon said.

Sent off into the “real world” with a slideshow and pixelated confetti, both classes have also expressed apprehension about entering an unstable job market.

Career Development Center Director Carol Spector said 61 percent of the class of 2020 were employed following graduation compared to 75 percent of the class of 2019.

Despite the dip, Spector said the 2020 data was higher than what she anticipated.

“It’s a little bit lower than normal, but pretty good,” she said. “Considering where we’re at right [now].”

Post-collegiate paths, Spector said, have to be more flexible now than they were in the past. Many graduates explored less-traditional employment opportunities after graduating last year, a tactic Spector is now advising the class of 2021 to pursue.

“If you have good writing skills and you wanted to work in the publishing industry or write your own novel, that may not happen right now,” Spector said. “How can you still use your writing skills and develop more, and work on some of your own projects on the side? Insurance agencies, financial organizations, [and] healthcare all look for good writers to do either blog posts [or] update website information.”

Brock Higley, a journalism graduate, said he was one of the lucky ones landing a job with a television news station in Missouri.

“I applied to anywhere from 100 to 120 positions across the US,” Higley said. “I would hit one state each day and apply to two or three jobs in each, just going down and back up the list. I didn’t land the job that I have right now until December of 2020, which was almost six months after I’d graduated.”

For Abigail Semple, who graduated last May, branching out of her VMA path secured her a job working for a smaller IT company.

“It’s a job that gives me a paycheck, which is great,” Semple said. “I am still looking for opportunities where I can better use my major… I just spent a quarter of a million dollars at Emerson College learning how to make movies to graduate into an environment where very few movies are being made. It’s definitely stressful.” frankie_rowley@emerson.edu

Soledad O’Brien speaking to graduates during 2019’s commencement. Courtesy Derek Palmer

The Berkeley Beacon

March 18, 2021

5

‘COVID Lead’ Erik Muurisepp reflects on policy, looks to long road ahead Dana Gerber

trainings, this is fine.’ But what was hard, it was all outside of one person’s expertise. This was another area where I’ve been able to grow, of being honest with, ‘I have no idea. I need to learn about that, I need to bring in the expert.’

Beacon Staff

In April, Assistant Vice President for Campus Life Erik Muurisepp was handed a herculean task: leading the college’s implementation and communication of coronavirus safety policy as reopening was planned. Almost a year after implementing one of the most successful campus reopenings in the greater Boston area, Muurisepp looked back on stepping into his role as “COVID Lead,” the biggest challenges of his position, and what he wishes he’d done differently. (Note: the text has been edited for brevity and clarity).

Q. When did you realize the tide was really turning towards the worse?

A. Probably that week we were saying ‘Hey, we’re ending classes on the 13th, everyone’s getting a week to then start back up.’ The other key was March 11, and I was sitting at home, and my wife and I were watching CNN … the President of the United States came on and did the travel restrictions. We had an 11:30 p.m. meeting that night, because that impacted a lot of other things.

That was the other defining moment of like, ‘Oh bleep. This is a new reality.’

That started those late-night meetings at my dining room table. We knew it was real, but we also left this space, packed up my stuff, saying, ‘Okay everyone, we’ll be back.’ And then boom.

Q. What was that week like, from a leadership perspective?

A. In the moment, I was in my AVP zone. We were all in that mode of do, do, do, do, do. I like a good crisis. I hate that they happen … but that’s sort of when I get into my zone of, ‘Great, let’s

Q. Is there anything you regret or wish you had done differently over the past year?

A. I don’t have any regrets about it. I often wonder … Did we make the right decisions on policy? I believe we did.

But I often wonder, ‘Could we have loosened up a little bit?’ I don’t know.

Right now, I think we could have, because I see how quickly and wonderfully our community rose up to the masking and distancing and all of that.

We had no measurements of success inside besides staying open, and we did, so I think right there that is success.

Eric Muurisepp, Emerson’s “COVID lead” sits behind his desk on campus. Alec Klusza / Beacon Staff go.’ It was March 12th, 13th-ish that we had decided to pull one of our kids from school. He has cystic fibrosis, so obviously there was a concern there.

For me, that was hard, because I was going full force and a leader here, so I didn’t even have time to pause and think about it. For me, when I’ve had those crises in the past, I go in, make sure my students are okay, make sure my colleagues are okay. They’re my forefront, and then I get home, usually, I walk through that door, and that’s where waterworks start.

Q. How did you step into that role?

Mental health suffers under pandemic’s emotional strain Annie Matica & Frankie Rowley Beacon Staff

Trigger Warning: Mentions of mental health issues and suicide.

Students are continuing to struggle with their mental health one year into living through a pandemic, with the cumulative effects of COVID-19 taking a toll on their social, academic, and financial wellbeing.

About 80 percent of the 210 students who visited Emerson’s Counseling and Psychological Services by March 2 of this semester reported experiencing some form of stress related to the pandemic, according to data provided by Associate Director of Counseling Services Kyle Rundles.

Students’ mental health, loneliness, missed experiences, and lack of motivation and focus are among the top concerns for those seeking services due to COVID-19, according to Rundles. Of the students who have visited ECAPS this semester, 68 percent reported their mental health has been negatively impacted by COVID-19— a slight increase from the 65.6 percent of students who visited ECAPS in the fall.

These statistics reflect national trends—71.2 percent of students indicated that their stress and anxiety levels had increased during the pandemic, according to a study from The Journal of Medical Internet Research in September 2020.

Dr. Sarah Ketchen Lipson, an as-

sistant professor in the Department of Health Law Policy and Management at Boston University of Public Health, said the pandemic added to the already increasing number of college students reporting mental health issues.

“Over the past five years, every semester, [it’s shocking] in terms of prevalence,” Lipson said. “I think we’ll continue to see that pattern.

Moving into the fall, I think we will still have high prevalence rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidality.”

Lipson said college student’s depression rates hit its peak when the pandemic first struck in spring 2020.

“In fall of 2020, it was still higher than fall of 2019, but a little bit lower than spring of 2020,” she said. “Anxiety has been holding pretty steady. It’s quite high, but it’s been holding pretty steady.”

COVID-19 safety guidelines imposed on college campuses have caused students to experience elevated levels of loneliness during a time when they would usually be creating social connections with their peers, Lipson said. Of the students who have sought services from ECAPS this semester, 66.7 percent reported feelings of isolation and loneliness.

“This moment in time where there is more attention than there ever has been on campus mental health, is this opportunity to take bigger steps towards the things we know are really important,” Lipson said. “How can we really build those social connections with their

Q. Did you ever feel like these decisions could have a really grave impact?

A. There were definitely times, right before reopening, where privately, I would say, ‘My gosh, did we advocate enough to make sure this is the right decision?’ Because you just never knew. What if we had a superspreader? That’s where for me where the personal and the work came together.

A. A lot of us had been tasked with chairing work teams, and I was chairing the work team on housing and dining. We put together a great presentation and said, ‘Look, these are the options. This is full capacity. This is at 75 percent, 50 percent, worst case scenario, one person per bathroom.’ I’m a pilot by education, so we were completely flying blind. The cliche that everyone keeps using is we’re building the plane as we’re flying it. Two days later, I got asked based on that presentation, ‘Can you help us with this, this is the goal, we want to have

a playbook, we want to have a plan that we can look to.’ That started my foray into being “COVID-19 Lead.”

Q. What do you see the role as?

A. In the beginning, it was reading, it was compiling, looking at state guidance, looking at federal guidance, looking at other states surrounding us.

It was all night long, all day long, creating 210 tasks, and then calling people from all over the institution to come together. That’s where it started to shift, because it became this major project.

It started as, ‘I’ve created manuals before, I’ve created guides and I’ve done

Q. Is there a playbook for what the rollback of regulations look like?

A. We’ve had some of those conversations. Nothing’s finalized yet, but I think I imagine a lot of that will look different than it does now for the fall. It’s not going to be like fall of 2019. We’re gonna be somewhere in that middle. But I think it’s gonna be a glorious middle that we all deserve, and we’ll be able to enjoy.

peers right from the beginning of college?”

First-year journalism major Beatrice Brynda said the severe depression she experienced because of the pandemic made the transition from high school to college that much more difficult.

“I immediately didn’t have the support system that I used to have in school and had to deal with some pretty severe depression because of that, which then kind of carried over into college,” Brynda said. “It was a very lonely orientation since we were all still in quarantine and couldn’t really see people. I didn’t end up making a lot of friends because of that, which led to just continually worsening depression and I ended up having to be partially hospitalized because of it, which I honestly don’t think would have happened in a non-pandemic year.”

Brynda added that attending online classes has exacerbated the impact of the pandemic on her mental health. This semester, 48.6 percent of the 210 students who sought services from ECAPS reported COVID-19 negatively impacting their academics. Furthermore, 60.4 percent of students reported having difficulty with their motivation or focus due to the pandemic.

“School has gotten so much harder than before,” Brynda said.

“I feel like somehow my attention span is short and it’s hard to pay attention to online classes and generally do work when you already spend so much time looking at a screen every day.”

This spring, 61.1 percent of students who visited ECAPS reported missed experiences or opportunities because of COVID-19. Lipson said that it is important for students to recognize the loss that they and their peers have been faced with over the course of a year.

“Acknowledging that and grieving that as opposed to maybe internalizing it and not talking about it—to say ‘Yeah I really miss this, I have missed out on x, y, or z that is actually important to me,” Lipson said.

Bennett Burns, a senior writing, literature, and publishing major, said she only recently realized the toll the pandemic has had on her mental health during the past year.

After transferring to Emerson in 2019 and deciding to study remotely from her home in Tennessee, Burns said she has struggled with caring for her own mental health from the confines of her childhood home.

“In the moment, it’s always like ‘Oh, stress is happening, it’s fine,’ she said. “But then I look back and I’m like, ‘Oh, no, no, this was defi-

nitely exacerbated by the situation of not being able to go outside on top of workload and things like that.’”

Lipson said colleges and universities are well positioned to offer valuable resources and guidance to those struggling.

“It’s not a problem that is unique to college populations, it’s more so that there are so many unique opportunities for intervention and prevention in college,” Lipson said.

The 2021 fall semester, Lipson said, will most likely continue to be challenging for students’ mental health. However, with the vaccination roll-out plugging along and cases in the state decreasing, she said she hopes the fall will also bring students some semblance of normalcy.

“I think there will be optimism and grief and continued trauma and fear that will continue to be there,” she said. “But there will also be joy.”

ECAPS offers a variety of mental health services to students, including group counseling, individual counseling, and urgent care services. Students seeking help can contact them at (617) 824-8595 or counseling_center@emerson.edu.

dana_gerber@emerson.edu

dana_gerber@emerson.edu

ECAPS office. Hongyu Liu / Beacon Staff

The Berkeley Beacon

March 18, 2021

6

‘Major changes’

Eleven students reflect on the extraordinary classroom experience of pandemic-era learning Dana Gerber, Ann E. Matica, Camilo Fonseca, Alec Klusza, Frankie Rowley Beacon Staff

Of Emerson’s 3,490 currently enrolled undergraduate students, no two have the same learning experience. Some visual and media arts students handle cameras and go out on the field, others spend their time in editing bays. Some writing, literature, and publishing students pore over the pages of classics, others build fictional worlds themselves. The diversity of academic experiences is why many students say they chose to enroll at Emerson—but it’s also why adjusting classrooms to the pandemic has been anything but straightforward.

The Beacon interviewed 11 undergraduate students enrolled in Emerson’s most popular majors about how their learning experience has changed since last March. Some have picked up new passions in light of pandemic-era restrictions; others have lost all faith in their area of study. In order of the major’s enrollment, in their own words (edited for brevity and clarity), these are their stories.

shoot with it. He tried to show us over Zoom, because that was most practical for the schedule.

But imagine him demonstrating this 1920s film camera from your own room—you can’t really learn without doing it hands on.

Journalism: Courtney Donohue, Sophomore

I definitely was more interested pre-COVID in [broadcast] journalism, but since COVID, I have added two new minors: marketing and photography. Now I’m more interested in photojournalism and the photo and writing side of it. I saw how it was harder to practice more broadcast journalism during these times, and picking up different ways of storytelling and adapting to what’s out there, job-wise and work-wise. It’s not like you can go out on the street and talk to random people.

Marketing Communications: Allyson Aronsky, Senior

During the fall semester is when I noticed the biggest difference, because I definitely noticed a lack of effort on some professors’ parts. One of my professor’s never showed up to class. He had a TA teach our in-person class, which Emerson usually says they don’t allow. It was a 400-level marketing class, so it should have been taught by a professor. We weren’t getting our money’s worth for that class. The quality of education was so much weaker than it was in the past.

When we first went online, it was definitely not a seamless transition. The projects were impossible to do because everyone was at home and in different time zones.

But now in my capstone class, we’ve had no issues being online, and the professor has been really accommodating.

Having an online internship and doing online classes has made it really easy to find a balance between the two. It’s a lot easier to find time in the day to do the things you need to do, such as scheduling meetings for my capstone project.

It’s more convenient to have everything online and the professors have been more accessible online as well.

Business of Creative Enterprises: Brianne Guanaga, Junior

Courtney Donahue

Allison Duggan

Visual Media Arts: Allison Duggan, Sophomore

The pandemic hit right when I was supposed to start gaining experience with production … and it basically skewed my understanding of how production works. All the experience I’ve had [making films], has been through the pandemic and onwards—nothing before it really.

Learning about film and getting experience with it is a really big team-building [exercise]; it requires a lot of teamwork, it’s very oriented towards working with each other. The fact is we can’t do that.

Because I didn’t [get that experience], I really noticed that during these projects, I didn’t really know how to do anything with the equipment—how to put any of it away, know what to grab, what to plug in, stuff like that—because there was no way of knowing that.

Last semester, I took Introduction to Film Production, and I noticed a definite difference from the class my professor would have taught before the pandemic—he kept saying that, too. The Bolex [16 mm film camera] is a piece of equipment no one from this time period really knows how to use, unless you’ve been taught.

Learning that is hard enough as it is, but [our professor] had less time to demonstrate how to

I liked finding random people and talking to them, and now it’s a lot more virtual. But I picked up this passion for photography over the pandemic, and incorporating it in that way and doing more detailed stories and less breaking news-style stuff. I’ve always had a liking for photography but never thought of it in connection to journalism, and then I got into it during quarantine. I had a camera, and I started using a lot, and then I took a photojournalism class and realized that I could connect it to my area of study. It was really cool how I still was able to write and tell stories without that unsafe connection to humans, which is weird.

Usually when you go out you go talk to people on the street. But by photographing them, I found that I was able to still tell a story without that face-to-face contact.

You came to Emerson, you were shown these big studios and all of these networking opportunities, and to that extent, it’s very hard to take advantage of all those opportunities and all those tools that they have during times of the pandemic.

Allyson Aronsky

Business, being in a creative enterprise, really appealed to me because I want to do music business and management. I definitely found my place within the BCE community.

Brianne Guanaga A lot of the BCE seniors have helped me get internships, too, so it’s us really looking out for each other, which I really appreciate.

We all need a little bit of community right now especially, because things are so isolating.

I’m currently in a collaboration seminar, so because everything is over Zoom, it’s a little harder, but the beauty of BCE is that business is everywhere. You don’t necessarily have to be in-person.

Working virtually is not that big of a difference for us, especially because it gives us a real taste of what it would be like to collaborate with people in other countries.

The thing I’m missing the most is going to meet-and-greets and seminars and stuff. But I think we’re one of the only majors that can be evolving with the times. Whoever coordinates [virtual events] has some of the coolest people ever to come and talk to the BCE students—Bobbi Brown was one, a couple weeks ago, which was really cool.

Because I do have an internship [with Sony Music], and I work closely with BCE, that fills those

gaps of me missing out on what would be normal, like concerts and tours.

Everyone is talking about what’s going to happen after the pandemic, which really sucks because it’s like, ‘Oh, so I can’t go to a concert and review,’ or ‘I can’t go backstage and talk with

eye and changing their experience just by looking at them, and meaning what I’m saying to them, or about them, or for them, or with them. I miss having that connection with them. I miss it dearly.

It’s sad when you go into these empty theaters.

The good thing about this school is that you can gauge what classes you want to take. I’m taking classes that I feel are beneficial to me as an actor, as a Black woman, as a theater practitioner.

I feel like it’s beneficial; I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything. People are creating works that express exactly what we’re going through right now. Some people are writing works that are supposed to take place over Zoom.

We’re doing what we’re supposed to as artists.

Writing, Literature and Publishing: Gabi Jonikas, Sophomore

Jasmine Hawkins the artists.’

Whoever coordinates [events] has some of the coolest people ever to come and talk to the BCE students—Bobbi Brown was one, a couple weeks ago, which was really cool. Those are always helpful because they’re talking about, obviously the future, but how they’re adapting to this new normal. Which gives me and everyone a sense of hope and comfort that just because we’re in a pandemic, that doesn’t mean it’s the end for our goals Theater and Performance: Jasmine Hawkins, Sophomore Being that our choice of profession is based off of people, it’s changed tremendously. We’re trying to find ways to make connections with each other and with the work, and being that acting can be really physical, we’re trying to find ways to do that safely and speak to the moment. We have to depend a lot more on physicality, versus before, we could solely use our voices and facial features and the way we look, but now half our face is blocked, so it’s become a lot more animated. Our major is really based off of public response, and the presence of people. So it’s been really hard not having that.

I have Movement in the Paramount Theatre, and we had to read a sonnet to an empty audience. And we had to imagine that someone we loved was sitting in that audience, and they were listening to the love sonnet that we were essentially saying to them. It made me realize how much I … really appreciate being an actor and being in the theater in general. It made me miss looking an audience member in the

Gabi Jonikas

Right now, I’m in Introduction to Electronic Publishing and it’s supposed to be very interactive and discussion-based, but now we do all the video and audio recordings [for podcasts and video assignments] over Zoom. That’s definitely very different and prevents us from making high-quality projects.

Ellen Brandon All the discussion-based classes have become isolated and a lot more lecture based because of the distance between us.

My copyediting course [is] … one class where the traditional classroom setting really would have benefitted us. [The] format is difficult to do on Zoom because there’s no whiteboard, so the teacher can’t write down a sentence then draw the copy edit marks on. Instead, it’s just pulling up a PDF and drawing on it on the Zoom whiteboard, which is kind of hard to read sometimes.

I think the quality [of my education] has declined. I took a literature class every semester except for this one because of my experience last semester. The flex learning plan was just not good.

Before, I found myself engaged in my literature classes, and I’m not a big fan of literature. I really enjoyed talking to my peers and the teacher and having meaningful discussions, but now all of that is gone.

When we’re on Zoom, no one has their camera on, and the teacher just lectures for two hours and we leave. I found myself not wanting to do the readings anymore and that was when I knew I needed to take a step back from literature classes.

Communication Studies: Ellen Brandon, Sophomore

The Berkeley Beacon

March 18, 2021

I chose Communication Studies because there were a lot of things at Emerson that intrigued me, and I didn’t know specifically what I wanted to do. Journalism interests me marketing, PR, all that, and that’s all in the realm of communication. I don’t want to be tied down to one thing, so I just thought, ‘I’ll do a communications major.’

The thing I feel like is disappointing would just be in my classes’ professors talk so much about the importance of connections and building relationships, professionals, but I feel I haven’t really made connections with people, I haven’t really seen people.

Hopefully when COVID is done I can actually be able to go meet people, talk to them, pick their brain, and form those connections they tell us are so important because it’s so hard to do through an email or on a Zoom call. I did pick up a sports communication minor because I really do love sports, so being able to go to sports events will be very exciting.

I’m taking Argument and Advocacy, which is basically debating each other, and I feel like doing that on Zoom is a recipe for disaster. We haven’t had to do it yet, but as the semester goes on we’re going to have to for our final project, and I just don’t see how that’s going to work on Zoom.

But you can’t change what’s going on. I like going in person because I feel the normalcy, but I’m also like, ‘Ugh, I have to get up and go to class.’ So it’s kind of like I’m never satisfied, it might just be me.

Individually Designed Interdisciplinary Program (Television and Sports Production): Sam Gutkin, Sophomore

Probably the main thing, I would say, in terms of IDIP’s effect with COVID is that [the college] gears their offerings towards the traditional majors, which makes sense that they would do because that’s what the vast majority of students do. I’m only taking one major class this semester because the other ones were filled.

I’m taking a VMA class. It’s Intro to Studio TV Production. I

7

really like that class, but there are restrictions on how many people can be in the studio.

There was one project where we had to use only three cameras where we maybe would have

Mackenzie Thomas wanted to use four. We had to have the fourth one unmanned because we couldn’t have an extra camera person. But it really honestly has been less of a hassle than I thought it would be with COVID restrictions in the studio. We are pretty much able to stay distanced and that stuff in there and still get done everything we want to get done. It probably would have been a little more productive if I took this class in a different semester, but even still I’m learning a lot from it and it’s still very worth it to take.

If there are limited class offerings again [in the fall] I could run into the same problem I did this year, except with less wiggle room to take liberal arts classes.

But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Zoom and everything, is not the comedy that I know, not the comedy that I love.

I did an improv class over Zoom for a requirement. It was half online and half in-person, and this class made me cry on several occasions. It was one of the most frustrating experiences I’ve had in an Emerson class. There would be ten-feet boxes taped on the ground and everyone had their own box and then our teacher would get wheeled around on a cart by her husband. If you’ve seen an improv show or you’ve done improv, you’ll know that it is impossible to do improv frozen in a ten-feet square.

That was horrible. I’m not a wonderful improviser to begin with but that did not make it any easier.

I wish our teachers didn’t hold such a high expectation for us to be ‘on’ and funny. There’s people dying and you want me to do improv?

Everyone’s lives are shifting so rapidly all the time because this pandemic is this unseen variable that happened to all of us. The expectation needs to be lowered a lot. I’m sorry that I don’t want to do improv games like Zip, Zap, Zop when there’s a pandemic happening and people are dying. The last year has not been built for our major and I think the major exists under a very specific pretense at Emerson.

Sports Communication: Will Dean, Junior

Comedic Arts: Mackenzie Thomas, Senior

My distaste for my major has become more clear since the pandemic hit. Maybe because I have had more time to dwell on it and think about things, but oh my god, it’s been so weird and crazy. I love comedy, but this comedic terrain that’s going on right now with

Will Dean

A lot of the off-campus opportunities that are so supplementary to a sports communication education—opportunities to go to the Garden to report or to do a sports PR project on, for example, all of those are suddenly unavailable.

The experiential learning component would be the biggest change for me.

When you are totally online the emphasis is on finding creative ways to use technology, and the emphasis is on the truly academic part—because you don’t have the experiential part of it. [Professors] can’t say ‘Okay, your assignment now is to go to this game and notice five things about the marketing you see around the stadium,’ now it has become all that much more academic.

I ended up starting my own

Victoria Sci business, and some of the classes I took then were catered more toward that experience. Having now been back in Boston and returning to a more sports focused curriculm I found so much of it ties back, so I feel a bit more well-rounded in that respect because basically being forced out of traditional sports experience allowed me to find more ways that other things connect.

I’ve been quite lucky that the pandemic struck the second semester of my sophomore year, it’s been strange because I feel like I’ve been on pause for about a year, a year and a half. I’m skipping basically from second semes-

ter sophomore to first semester senior.

I’m really, really hoping that things return to normal so that I can get some of those experiences; taking sports management, a class I’ve been looking forward to taking for a long time … so many of the components of why I came to Emerson and to Boston in general.

I do really hope and pray that next semester things return to normal so that I can at least get one last semester of everything I hoped and dreamed of coming here.

Communication Disorders: Victoria Sci, Junior

I wasn’t too sure what to expect coming back in the fall; we didn’t have any experience with CSD classes doing the hybrid model yet. Things were actually better than I personally was expecting. I took Survey of Speech Disorders, and normally in that course, you get to go into the Robbins Center over in the Union Bank building and observe clients getting treated. But unfortunately, because of COVID, they are primarily doing teletherapy. All of our video observations we had to do through this website, Master Clinician, where speech therapists across the country upload videos of them doing therapy. That was definitely a letdown—especially because one of the really big benefits of Emerson is the fact that we have that on-campus clinic.

I really learn a lot from watching other people do therapy—my goal down the line is to become a speech language pathologist.

Watching these observations online, you’re still learning, you’re still getting experience, but it doesn’t compare at all to being in person. In the Robbins Center, you’re [doing observations] behind a two way mirror; it has a whole different atmosphere from sitting in your dorm room on a computer. I was really looking forward to those. They are probably one of my favorite things about the learning process.

contact@berkeleybeacon.com

Vaccine rollout progressing, health experts forsee a return to ‘normal’ in the fall

Cont. from Pg. 1 according to Assistant Vice President for Campus Life and “COVID Lead” Erik Muurisepp.

“We’ve had conversations about it, but no decisions have been made yet,” Muurisepp said.

He also said the college’s efforts to loosen capacity restrictions are based on city and state guidance, which have progressed further in their reopening plans since the initial hybrid learning announcement. Emerson reopened multi-person seating in its dining centers the same day Massachusetts entered Phase Three, Step Two of its reopening plan. The fourth and final phase, which allows the reopening of stadiums, arenas, and performance venues, is slated for March 22.

The rising vaccination rate in Massachusetts—nearly one million residents are fully inoculated—should be an encouraging sign for colleges, Siegel said.

“It seems almost certain that, by the beginning of the fall, everyone who wants to will be able to get vaccinated,” he said.

Though Siegel expects colleges to return to in-person classes at some point during the fall semester, he said the prospect of safely returning to the hallmarks of campus life—parties, live performances, and sporting events—is

not yet assured.

“If we reach a level of herd immunity—a level of vaccination above which the virus really can’t spread—the virus may fizzle out and not really be much of a concern,” Siegel said. “The problem, though, is that if we don’t reach that level it could become endemic, [meaning] it still will be around and still be infecting people.”

Given the gradual decline in new cases and hospitalizations, Massachusetts may already have “partial herd immunity,” according to Dr. Todd Ellerin, South Shore Health’s director of infectious diseases. However, he said it would take “a couple years” to determine whether the virus was endemic—a constantly recurring disease, like the common cold—or at least seasonal—recurring based on time of year, like the flu.

“The first year of a pandemic, you almost never have true seasonality because there’s no background immunity,” Ellerin said. “You have an entire susceptible population around the world.”

It is possible the virus will continue to transmit throughout the year, according to Ellerin. Even without endemicity, he said he expects infection rates to rise in the fall and winter of 2021, as it did in 2020—especially if it continues to mutate into new, more transmissible

‘I’m confident this is going to be a great summer.

I am feeling very optimistic. But then the fall becomes a question mark.’

- Todd Ellerin

variants.

Massachusetts is sixth in the nation in terms of vaccines administered per capita—a rate that could rise after Gov. Charlie Baker’s announcement Wednesday that the state will expand vaccine eligibility to the general public, including Emerson students, on April 19. Nevertheless, Siegel said he was still concerned with the rapid pace of the state’s reopening process, warning the college against proceeding too quickly with its return to normalcy.

“Vaccination is taking such a long time—and in the meantime, everything is open,” he said. “This seems like the perfect time to be protecting people, if we can just be patient enough; it’s the last time in the world to be opening things up and just letting the virus spread at its own speed.”

“Unfortunately, that’s what we’re doing in Massachusetts,” he continued. “That’s what a lot of other states are doing. It means there’s going to be a lot of unnecessary illness and death.”

Dr. Daniel Kuritzkes, chief of the infectious diseases division at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said the city needed to take a “nuanced approach” to the question of reopening.

“I don’t see any problem with letting retail shops function at regular capacity [in the fall],” Kuritzkes

said “I’m not particularly concerned about having people together in a lecture hall, as long as everybody is masked.”

His concern, he said, is that people will take advantage of the loosened restrictions by gathering in public, without necessarily having been vaccinated first.

“That is the challenge,” he said.

“We don’t want to be asking people to flash their vaccine cards, and then be trying to enforce some regulation where this person needs to be wearing a mask, that person doesn’t, this person gets in, and that person doesn’t.”

All three health experts stressed the next several weeks and months are critical in safeguarding the fall semester.

“I’m confident this is going to be a great summer,” Ellerin said.

“There’s been a marked reduction in cases, I am feeling very optimistic. But then the fall becomes a question mark.”

“The worst is behind us, that much I’m confident about,” he continued. “I don’t want to speculate yet what the big bars and sporting arenas are going to look like, whether we’re going to be masked or unmasked. It all depends on what a potential fall surge looks like. I don’t know.” camilo_fonseca@emerson.edu

The Berkeley Beacon

Opinion

Beacon Staff

Traversing grief during the pandemic Cont from Pg. 1 family and a story attached to them. A meal that will never be made again, an empty recliner and a song that goes unsung.

Unfortunately, collective grief comes alongside numbness. We, as a human collective, when overwhelmed with so much sorrow, seem to have an “off” switch. It’s easier to shut it all out than to fully process what over two million deaths, many unnecessary and avoidable, truly means. We have a moral obligation to remember the amount of people lost, and to hold those accountable who enabled mass death.

That being said, in the U.S., not all grief is carried the same. Black Americans and Indigenous Americans have experienced loss at a scale greater than any other racial demographic in America. Black Americans have accounted for 15 percent of all COVID-related deaths where race is a known factor, 1.5 times the mortality rate of white Americans, according to The Covid Tracking Project.

The feeling of loss during this pandemic is not one concrete feeling. It is anger, it is grief, it is numbness and it is fluid. Do not beat yourself up if you find yourself becoming numb to cope;it is something that we’ve all had to do.

We are experiencing overwhelming waves of grief on a societal scale, the likes of which have never been seen in the contemporary age.

But something happened to the phenomenon of collective grief in response to the pandemic—it has become politicized and capitalized.

Commercials for services and products will rally its audiences around a communal duty to “do our part” and make a quick buck, profiting off of of pathos. The lives lost to COVID became political pawns in the House of Representatives and Senate. A CBS News Battleground Poll found 57 percent of Republicans said the number of COVID-related deaths in America to be “acceptable.”

A common pattern of rhetoric that I’ve seen in the recent months is “how do we move on?” I don’t think “moving on” should be part of the equation just yet. Grief is an open wound that not only needs to heal, it needs to be stitched back

together with intent and allowed to scar over. The wound one day may be healed, but that scar will always leave a raised, off-color reminder of the hole that was once there. So long as our grief is being profited off of or being used for political gain, it cannot heal.

This is not a new trend— deaths on a grand scale have always been politicized. When the planes crashed into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, the lives lost were quickly mourned by public officials, then used as a reason to initiate war, causing a grander loss of innocent life in its wake. Ashes to ashes, terrorism to more terrorism.

The cycle of tragedy into healing has been turned into a Catherine’s Wheel, slowly and painfully turning at the hands of those in power.

The deaths resulting from a pandemic seem to trigger a different type of grief than deaths from war or terrorism. With the latter, there’s a defined enemy and target to blame, with that comes a pre-made formula for justice. Kill the baddies, the lives are avenged. But the tragedy of this pandemic is that it does not come with one concrete solution to mourn the dead. Who do we blame?

Who do we hold accountable? Most importantly, how much more can we take?

In an article for The Atlantic, journalist and historian Garrett M. Graff writes,, “the deaths of 2020 wiped from our national memory in shame, an embarrassing chapter in which our government failed us and we failed our fellow Americans.”

There is a sense of frustration that comes along with this pandemic;; those of us who have stayed vigilant, worn masks and socially distanced look at the people who are reckless and are left saying,, “what’s the point?”

The point is to care. Care for yourself, care for your community and care for the world around us.

Care is the antidote to apathy,, and apathy is the silent killer. So please, celebrate the miles we’ve traveled in combating COVID, but don’t forget the lives lost along the way.

When telling the story of COVID twenty-odd years from now, we need to make sure we’re telling the whole story. joshua_sokol@emerson.edu

8

When will I get the vaccine?

Shannon Garrido

Courtesy Josh Sokol

March 18, 2021

Amid seven new variants of the already malicious novel coronavirus reaching the United States, my fellow Emerson students and I wonder: when will we get the vaccine?

Emerson students have received email after email regarding COVID-19 vaccine updates, all with a similar message: we don’t know. At the time of publication, Emerson has yet to release a detailed plan for when students could be vaccinated through the college.

All we do know right now is this: Tufts Medical Center has included the Emerson community in its vaccination clinic planning and students are expected to become eligible for the vaccine when phase three of vaccination begins—on April 19.

It’s understandably frustrating that the Emerson administration has provided very little information to students about their vaccination. Students are feeling burnt out and desperately crave a sense of normalcy after a hellish year.

However, we must ask ourselves if we, students attending a private college, should complain about not

lic, while more than three million Massachusetts residents are still waiting their turn. Through all this, essential workers have been slowly pushed to the back of the line.

Massachusetts initially prioritized essential workers and first responders in the second phase of its vaccination plan. But in late January, Governor Charlie Baker moved residents 65 and older, a group of more than half a million people, to the front of the queue.

In keeping with a new Biden administration directive to inoculate all educators with their first dose by the end of March, the state has opened up eligibility to teachers, child-care workers, and other school staff.

Meanwhile, the decision to move up teachers has kept other essential workers, including MBTA staff, restaurant workers, and grocery store employees cast aside. According to WCVB, the move will make about 400,000 educators newly eligible, while Gov Baker said it will “mean we’ll be back to having about a million people who are eligible to receive a vaccine.”

This has led the state’s education commissioner to want the authority to force Massachusetts schools to open in April, which could potentially be dangerous for essential

Not to mention this order of eligibility goes against the CDC recommendation that states should prioritize front-line essential workers for the vaccine. The CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted 13 to 1 to recommend millions of frontline essential workers, which include first responders, teachers, food and agriculture, manufacturing, U.S. Postal Service, public transit, and grocery store workers priority for the vaccines.

Police almost universally received earlier access to the vaccine in the first or second wave, while grocers were often given no priority access in numerous states, including Massachusetts. Not to mention that 30 percent of Massachusetts State Police have not received the vaccine even though the department has offered shots at its own clinics.

At the beginning of the pandemic, politicians praised essential workers for their services, claiming they would do all they could to protect them. Now, not only have they been pushed aside by their state to receive the vaccine, but suffer from tremendous economic vulnerability as well. In the state of Massachusetts alone, higher rates of COVID-19 communicate with

Illustration Lucia Thorne

getting this vaccine fast enough without considering essential workers who should have gotten it much earlier.

Massachusetts had a slow beginning in vaccine distribution.

Despite receiving the 12th most vaccine doses per capita, in February The Boston Globe reported the COVID-19 vaccine launch across the state suffered due to “supply shortages, unused doses, and vexing technical complexity.” On Tuesday, the Globe reported that several other states have already started vaccinating the general pub-

workers, taking into consideration that they haven’t gotten vaccinated. Young adults are more likely to contract and spread the disease, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Although essential workers are eligible to register on Monday, that doesn’t mean they will all be vaccinated by the end of April—especially considering the issues the registration site has been having. Earlier last month the state vaccination sign-up website crashed for more than two hours after its launch, and the 60,000 new appointments filled up almost instantly.

© 2020 The Berkeley Beacon. All rights reserved.

Editor-in-Chief Katie Redefer

The Beacon is published weekly.

Anything submitted to the Beacon becomes the sole property of the newspaper. No part of the publication may be reproduced by any means without the express written permission of the editor.

(617) 824–8687 berkeleybeacon.com contact@berkeleybeacon.com

Managing Editors Charlie McKenna (Content) Madison E. Goldberg (Content) Maximo Aguilar Lawlor (Multimedia) Dylan Rossiter (Operations) Section Editors Dana Gerber (News) Lucia Thorne (Living Arts) Juliet Norman (Opinion) Christopher Williams (Sports) Hongyu Liu (Photo) Advisor Rachel Layne

greater percentages of workers in essential services, so it’s critical to prioritize essential workers to reduce the severity of this pandemic.

Most of us want the vaccine, and we all want to feel this pandemic simmer down. As of right now, that is a dream that many in this country cannot afford. We must use this motivation and the resources available to us to pressure elected officials like Gov. Baker to consider them—and be patient in waiting for our share of the vaccine. shannon_garrido@emerson.edu

Letters to the Editor: If you want to respond to, or share an opinion about, an article in The Beacon, you can write a short letter to the editor. Email it to letters@berkeleybeacon. com. Please note that letters may be edited.

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The Berkeley Beacon

March 18, 2021

9

What the pandemic has taken from us Juliet Norman Beacon Staff

I remember my last day of normalcy perfectly. I met my friend Natalie for morning coffee at The Thinking Cup, went back to my dorm to say a quick goodbye to my roommate, and took the blue line to Boston Logan where I boarded a Florida-bound flight for my mom’s weekend wedding. The next day, Emerson sent an email telling students that in addition to moving classes online the week before, the campus was now closing down due to an outbreak of Coronavirus cases in the Boston area. I ended up staying in Florida for 10 months.

When the pandemic first began last spring, most people tried to remain positive. After the few thousand positive cases in Massachusetts began to clear up, students would be on campus by September and back to their normal routines.

At first, the most disappointing thing I came to terms with was the fact that, from now on, I wouldn’t be celebrating any of my friend’s 21st birthdays at The Tam. Now, a year into the pandemic, this sacrifice feels normal. More than a year of our college experience has been lost forever, and the scary reality of graduating into a pandemic looms ahead.

Still, I cannot help but feel nostalgic for all of the things the pandemic has stolen from us. Both long-standing and personal traditions that as college students, we will never get back.

There’s meeting up with classmates in the library to study together, and then not studying at all.

Catching up with friends over a plate of dumplings in Chinatown. Showing support for a campus comedy troupe by attending their late-night shows. A lot of this feels frivolous now, but it’s participating in these things that make our college experience our own, and it hurts to know that some upperclassmen may never experience this again. It’s even more difficult not to blame the people who have shown a lack of consideration by skirting around basic COVID restrictions. Just like every other person I’ve spoken to in the past year, the pandemic has taken a lot

Illustration Lucia Thorne

from me. I had to stop working for several months when the restaurant I worked at shut down indefinitely, eliminating my only source of income. The global travel ban meant that I wouldn’t be able to visit my family overseas—I haven’t seen my father for over a year now, and still don’t know when I’ll be allowed to visit him. Most of my friends have either taken a semester or an entire year off while they wait for the virus to be contained. Many of my peers were forced to adapt to entirely remote internships and job opportunities during the past year, while other internships have been scrapped altogether. In a College Reaction and Axios poll from last May, 75 percent of college students said their summer jobs and internship programs had either been canceled, moved remote, or delayed, and 22 percent of students said they were not planning on enrolling in the fall 2020 semester.

Most recently, I have to accept

that instead of heading to a New York City midtown office every morning for my upcoming summer internship, I will be working primarily from the comfort of my apartment, staring at a laptop screen all day. Even after the pandemic, it feels likely that many internship programs will remain in remote format longterm. Upwork’s “Future of Workforce Pulse Report” predicts that one in four of Americans will work remotely by 2025.

The pandemic’s disruption of our daily lives has forced us to re-evaluate both our professional and personal relationships. Having to go months without in-person contact and the regularity of our day-to-day lives ultimately shows us the people who truly care about us. Seeing how workplaces, our friends and family, and our college itself handled the pandemic has revealed a lot about how the people around us, specifically how uncaring they can be.

I’ve written about how much the

public disregard for safety in favor of entertainment has bothered me in The Beacon before. Seeing people I know continuing to partake in activities where correct social distancing is essentially impossible, like bar hopping, dining out at sitdown restaurants, going to theme parks, and partying, upsets me. Even so, a part of me can understand the power of loneliness and isolation that tempted people to ignore the risks, especially as the pandemic has dragged on.

I’m going to blame this thoughtless decision making on “psychological reactance.” First proposed in the 1960s by psychologist Jack Brehm, psychological reactance occurs when someone feels their freedom is being jeopardized. Because people generally hate being told what to do or how to act, they end up doing the opposite. During a time where so much is out of our control, engaging in the activities that we were so used to pre-COVID feels like a power

play. If anything, seeing how many people have been blinded by this selfishness shows how strong the desire for human connection really is, even when it comes at the cost of potential illness or death.

We have a right to be furious at both the government’s handling of the virus and the carelessness of the people around us that caused so many Americans to die. Sacrificing a year of our lives to be in practically the same place as where we started last March, all because people couldn’t follow directions of experts, makes everything feel so much worse.

Knowing that we are all collectively struggling with the same feelings of disappointment and restlessness does help. The pandemic has slashed plans and opportunities for everyone. Even if it feels like we’re failing at life right now, at least we have a good excuse. juliet_norman@emerson.edu

COVID-19 exposed the gaps in America’s education system

Courtesy Lucia Thorne

Lucia Thorne Beacon Staff

Trigger warning: This op-ed discusses topics related to mental illness.

After a year of experimenting with new forms of learning in an attempt to simulate an in-person experience, it is quite evident that nothing compares to traditional in-person learning.

Even at the beginning of a nationwide shutdown last March, it became painfully clear that the childcare, food security, and learning disability accommodations available because of in-person education were now absent, much like the seats in every classroom.

College students have the advan-

tage of age and independence, and therefore we suffer less at the hands of the pandemic’s effects on our education, and the development of our social skills.

However, the hybrid learning model does hinder our ability to get the education we hoped to receive when applying to institutions like Emerson– which are more likely to possess the funding to be able to provide a modified in-person education during the pandemic.

Unfortunately, the modifications made to deal with the potential spread of COVID-19 did not take into account the challenges for mentally ill and neurodivergent students.

Sophomore Kelsey Callahan shifted to completely online learning after her experience with hybrid learning as a neurodivergent student who also has severe anxiety during the fall 2020 semester.

“Personally, I need consistency to function, and I need to know what’s happening,” Callahan said. “I don’t like things changing that much. I know that [the hybrid learning model] works for some people, but I know for a lot of neurodivergent and mentally ill students, it’s kind of like there’s a lot of lack of consistency.”

The switch from online to in-person each day became too overwhelming for Callahan, leading her to choose a semester online. Callahan

said this option ended up working best for her, aside from the three hour time difference in California.

Hybrid learning also posed another challenge for Callahan: receiving and being able fully utilize disability accommodations. Her experience with group work using breakout rooms with the challenge of working all-online has only become more difficult.

“Group work honestly got worse,” Callahan said. “I struggled with that a lot in high school. Most of my teachers gave me the individual accommodation of working by myself. But when you’re working over breakout rooms, that’s nearly impossible to do.”

Emerson first-year student Zack Reichgut, who has ADHD, generalized anxiety disorder, and major depressive disorder, said he finds it easier to participate in online schooling since there is less pressure in presenting yourself to classmates and professors.

“It’s just easier for me because I can stay in my room, I don’t need to look nice, I can eat while I’m learning,” Reichgut said. “It’s sometimes easier for me to pay attention when I’m just in my bed listening to it like it’s a podcast.”

As someone who struggles with mental illnesses myself, I can say with complete conviction this hybrid learning model has been detrimen-

tal to my health. When I first started writing this op-ed, I thought that I liked the learning model for the same reasons Zack mentioned. But I realized it was not me who liked it, but my mental illnesses.

I suffer from anxiety, depression, seasonal affective disorder, and obsessive compulsive disorder. My OCD has progressively worsened throughout the course of the pandemic, however, I first viewed it as a blessing in disguise. Because of my compulsions, I became hypervigilant in washing my hands, cleaning surfaces, and keeping a mask on at all possible times, and therefore, not contracting or spreading COVID-19.

But at that time, I was still in my hometown of Agoura Hills, California, only going out about once a week to get groceries or an iced tea from my local McDonald’s. Now, I’m living in Boston, going out almost daily and living in a building with people (and their sanitary habits) I don’t know.

That fear of the unknown regarding my neighbors and classmates COVID habits leads me to clean everything I have on me every time I leave my dorm. The compulsions become so intense that sometimes I don’t leave my dorm or go to class because I’m so tired of cleaning.

I realized that if I had class every single day in-person, I would lose all

my motivation, as well as my mind, by trying to keep up with my mental illness. But I also realized that by staying in so often, I am feeding into my own depression.

I just recently started going out once a day again, and this past week was the first time I had more than one meal a day in about two months.

I finally don’t need to clean as often because of updated treatment for my mental illnesses, but my awareness of the virus around me has not left my mind.

For me, being either all in-person or all online is not an option during this time, because one way or the other, one of my mental illnesses will get the best of me, and hybrid learning is the only thing keeping me from going too far in one direction. But for others, like Kelsey and Zack, hybrid learning is not the best option. And that’s okay, because we are all individuals. But it’s time the education system starts to treat us as such.

The hybrid learning model has highlighted two major issues within our education system: lack of consistent scheduling and impersonalized, cookie-cutter-like curriculum. Students shouldn’t feel so overwhelmed by school in a time like this. lucia_thorne@emerson.edu

The Berkeley Beacon

March 18, 2021

10

Living Arts

For students, a look toward a post-pandemic life Madison E. Goldberg Beacon Staff

Exactly one year ago, Emerson’s students were sent back to their homes across the country as COVID-19 made its way through the historic streets of Boston, and onto the campus that we call home.

This was a reversal of the college’s earlier decision to transition to online learning with the option of remaining on campus. Within a bleak few days, students abruptly packed their lives in boxes and said goodbye to their plans.

But now, a year down the road and a vaccine making its way through the country, students are beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel after all that was lost.

This beacon of hope has many students, myself included, dreaming of the days when the pandemic is finally over. With the vaccine being distributed to Gen Z soon, I’m hoping to have my friends from both Emerson and my hometown in New Jersey come visit my new home of Franklin, Tennessee, where I moved to nearly three years ago. I’m also looking forward to potentially going to concerts again–after all, I do live just outside of Music City now.

Despite the many things I’ve missed this year, I felt fortunate to have a safe place to go home to and spend time with my family. But the fork in the road for my plans is minor compared to the massive changes some other students experienced.

Megan D’Souza, a junior public relations major, was sent home from

the Disney College Program (DCP) on March 15, 2020. The DCP is a five to seven month program in which college students get to work in Disney World’s parks while also completing related college coursework. She had first planned to participate in the program 10 years ago.

“It was truly everything I could have dreamed and more, plus not being able to say proper goodbyes to everyone is what added to the heartbreak of it ending so suddenly,” D‘Souza said.

The program inspired D’Souza to change her major from journalism to public relations, and she hopes to continue working with Disney at the corporate level after graduation.

D’Souza said after receiving the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine recently, she plans to reunite with her friends from the DCP this summer, and potentially make a trip back to “the most magical place on earth.”

“I feel a lot safer traveling now that I’ve been vaccinated,” D’Souza said. “I hope to visit some of my friends who live across the country, and definitely hope to visit [Disney World] sometime this summer, even if just as a guest. Ideally, in the future, I’d love to go back to working there.”

The pandemic’s initial spread about a year ago also canceled the college’s numerous Global Pathways programs last summer. Among them was the sports communication-focused program in Sydney, Australia.

Sophomore Sam DeCoste was among the students set to participate.

The program includes two sports communication classes from May to

July, and would have set DeCoste on track to graduate a semester early.

“I’ve never seen that part of the world, and was looking forward to it,” DeCoste said. “It would’ve been a great opportunity for personal growth.”

DeCoste said he’s looking forward to the prospect of potentially being able to travel, visit friends, and work on his future career this summer.

“I’m looking forward to traveling more–maybe even seeing my friends who live in other parts of the country, like California and Texas,” DeCoste said. “But the number one thing I’m looking forward to next year is going to the Superbowl with WEBN. It’s one of the reasons why I came to Emerson.”

Other students found themselves missing loved ones. Junior political communication major Sara Hathaway hasn’t seen either of her sisters, one living in the U.K. and the other living in Las Vegas, since Christmas 2019. Now that Hathaway has been vaccinated, a reunion this summer is finally in sight.

“Even though I am still a bit worried about travel, the number one thing I want to do is see my sisters again,” Hathaway said. “I’m really holding out hope that either I can go out to visit her in the U.K. or that she can come back to the U.S. this summer. It would also be nice if I could go over there to start looking at graduate schools.”

Hathaway’s sisters are some of her “best friends,” and being separated from them this past year has been difficult, she said.

Davin Roberts (left), technical EP of The 40th Evvy Awards. Courtesy Davin Roberts

Student organizations navigate the hurdles of pandemic-era operations Ann E. Matica Beacon Staff

Student organizations, a focal point of the Emerson experience for many, have weathered a year in the pandemic despite an abundance of logistical hurdles and safety guidelines curtailing typical programming.

Since last spring, student organizations have been forced to adapt to strict capacity limits and social distancing guidelines set by the college and state to continue operating.

Director of Student Engagement and Leadership Jason Meier said when students were sent home last March, SEAL had to scramble to determine how student organizations would be able to continue to operate once they returned for the fall semester.

“I would say those first few weeks we were meeting as an office every single day to toss out ideas, ways to

move things virtually, how we were going to do budgets for the next year … how we’re going to do anything,” Meier said.

In July, the college notified students that room capacity limits on campus would be reduced to 20 to 25 percent of their normal capacity. This caused many student organizations to transition their operations completely online or to go into ‘hibernation’—which allowed organizations on campus to go inactive over the fall semester without losing funding or their affiliation with the college.

“We went in with this idea that this is jarring, this is overwhelming, and not everyone has the same setup at home,” Meier said. “We quickly decided we wouldn’t close an [organization] over it, we wouldn’t shut anyone down, there would be no judgement.”

When students returned to Emerson’s Boston campus last fall, they were challenged with adapting their

organizations to a new set of guidelines surrounding food, capacity limits, and activity restrictions.

Emerson Hillel President Rachel Tabin said the biggest challenge has been hosting events that include organization members who are studying remotely, but they have found ways to accommodate students in both modalities.

“You can come pick up your meal in the Lion’s Den from us and then join us on Zoom for Shabbat service,” Tabin said. “People who are in Boston can pick up the meals and then people who are all the way in California can still come to Shabbat.”

Although the pandemic has restricted student organizations from consuming food in the same space, multicultural events like ASIA’S bubble tea series, EBONI’s ‘Popeyes and pop-off ’ events, Hillel’s Shabbat dinners, and picnics on Boston Common AMIGOS have continued to happen

Courtesy Megan D’Souza “It’s so hard to maintain closeness when you can’t even be physically close once a year,” Hathaway said.

“My mom, my sisters, and I started getting on FaceTime and baking something, or doing things we would do in person together, just to try and make it seem like normal.”

Students are also looking forward to the eventual return to some normalcy in day-to-day life. Sophomore journalism major Grace Rispoli lamented about how much she misses simple, everyday aspects of her pre-pandemic life.

“When I first came home, my mom couldn’t even hug me,” said Rispoli. with some alterations, Meier said.

Organizations on campus are now required to submit food requests that must be reviewed and approved by SEAL. If approved, members pick up food supplied by SEAL and either eat it socially distanced in an outdoor area or take it to their individual dorm rooms to eat together over Zoom.

Meier said that due to the increase of COVID-19 cases throughout the state, restrictions on organization gatherings became even more strict this semester.

“We are not here to break anyone, we are just here to make sure that we can stay open,” he said. “Really coming down from that has been a challenge, not having nice weather, not being able to play in the common and gather with your friends outside.”

Diana Holiner, president of Hidden Lantern—an organization that focuses on art-based conversations about mental health—said there has been a sharp decline of new members since the pandemic.

“A lot of the reason that we got more submissions in previous years was because we were able to go to [organization] fairs in person,” Holiner said. “We were able to put posters up a lot more, and that was one of the reasons that we got more submissions in previous years than during the pandemic. I think the most challenging part is getting people to sign up, because it’s been really hard to get outreach and visibility during the pandemic.”

Currently, Hidden Lantern has a total of eight members that organize and host an annual arts festival.

During the fall semester, the festival took place completely online which posed some technological difficulties, according to Holiner.

“Logistics were actually pretty tough … I had to call my dad because he’s a tech person and ask what we were doing wrong,” she said.

Although, connecting with oth-

She said she hopes to head home to Illinois this summer and safely reunite with her family and friends, and possibly even travel to new destinations this summer.

“I can’t wait for the simple things, like not having to wear masks anymore. We’re all just twenty-something trying to get jobs and graduate college with this added barrier of the pandemic. I can’t wait to work on the trajectory of my life again without this added on the side.”

It is important to acknowledge that travel and internships are privileges. Throughout this pandemic, Americans across the country have struggled with food insecurity, homelessness, and job loss. Additionally, COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted BIPOC communities at alarmingly higher rates. The pandemic has only exposed these long standing issues that have impacted marginalized groups–hopefully, with awareness, comes action.

Massachusetts recently entered Phase 2 of its vaccination program, focusing on those 65 and older, those with two or more medical conditions, those who work in low-income or senior housing, and K-12 educators, staff, and childcare workers. Starting April 19, the general adult population will be eligible for the vaccine.

Here’s to a vaccinated, COVIDfree future, coming to a city near you.

May we always appreciate the smiles in the street and the hugs from loved ones, because moments like these, though simple, are fleeting. madison_goldberg2@emerson.edu er members of the organization has been far from easy. Holiner said she enjoys attending the virtual bi-weekly meetings and staying active on Hidden Lanterns’ Instagram page.

“The pandemic has made people more aware of mental health than ever,” she said. “If everyone is vaccinated by the fall, it would be great to have in-person festivals again.

There’s a certain connectivity to being in person. I feel like that is something we lost during the pandemic and I feel like that would be really important to get back, especially because Hidden Lantern is all about mental health and human connection.”

Robby Gessel, president of the student comedy troupe Chocolate Cake City, said the group hosted their auditions over Zoom last semester, which posed challenges.

“Some people might not be as comfortable auditioning over Zoom or might be different over Zoom than they are in person, so we had to sort of navigate that,” he said.

The organization is currently operating completely over Zoom this semester and is focusing on pitching, writing, and filming comedy sketches.

“Navigating all the rules was something we had to work on,” Gessel said. “I definitely learned a lot between last semester and now about how to plan and how important it is to plan things to make sure that everything is within guidelines.”

Despite the challenges of creating comedy through virtual platforms, Gessel said his organization provides him with comfort during a period of uncertainty.

“It’s nice to have a group of people that you can talk to and make comedy with,” he said. “That’s still there even in the pandemic. It’s a comforting thing to have a group of people that you can talk with.” ann_matica@emerson.edu

The Berkeley Beacon

March 18, 2021

11

The reality of survival at cultural institutions during the pandemic Lucia Thorne Beacon Staff

While the pandemic rages on after more than a year has passed since it began, Americans’ go-to outlets for entertainment look quite different from how they did a year ago.

Making whipped coffee and watching Tiger King is no longer the sole source of entertainment like it was during the early days of quarantine in spring 2020. The vaccination process is currently underway and cultural institutions in Boston have begun to reopen, giving Emersonians and Bostonians alike the chance to get out and enjoy the culture of the city.

However, the transition from quarantine to public engagement brought many challenges for some museums and other kinds of cultural institutions, like the New England Aquarium and the Museum of Fine Arts.

New England Aquarium Director of Communications and Public Relations, Pam Bechtold Snyder, spoke with The Beacon about how their institution adapted to the many changes brought on

by COVID-19.

In regards to basic COVID-19 safety, Snyder said the aquarium enforces constant (and proper) mask wearing, staggered staff schedules that phase out according to COVID case patterns, oneway walking paths for guests to follow, increased cleaning maintenance for crowded areas, and timed ticketing that ensures the attendance stays below 20 percent capacity.

“We feel that that’s the safest experience possible for our visitors,” Snyder said. “As more people get vaccinated and the state guidelines change, we will continue to evaluate this capacity restriction.”

At the time of the interview, Snyder said that there have been no known cases of COVID spreading among staff or visitors as a result of being in the aquarium.

To make up for lost funds, Snyder said the aquarium launched their “Mis-

sion Forward Funds.” The fundraising campaign was incredibly helpful and successful, she said, however it could not fully make up for their financial losses.

“Thanks to the generosity of so many supporters that funds brought in $11.5 million last year, but even with all of that, generated an operating loss of $5 million last year,” Snyder said.

Although the decrease in ticket sales has hit the aquarium hard, seeing as ticket sales and special events make up about 80 percent of their revenue, Snyder said the use of online programming was able to keep potential visitors and regulars occupied until their first reopening July of 2020. The aquarium closed again from December 2020 to early February.

“When it became clear that we were gonna have to be closed for an extended period of time, we created virtual animal encounters, close sessions with animals and trainers,” Snyder said. “People do them for corporate events or for birthday parties, and even school groups.”

In addition to the virtual animal encounters, Snyder said the aquarium also launched a virtual academy in Nov. 2020 to educate children on marine life and science from kindergarten to fifth grade.

“We also saw a need for school-aged standards-aligned stem programming that would replace field trips and they include a video and activity for students with a virtual interaction with our aquarium staff on zoom,” Snyder said.

Snyder said the aquarium is counting on public support to continue recovering from the financial losses of the pandemic.

“We really hope that people of all ages, once they feel comfortable and they feel safe, come through our doors to visit the penguins, to see the seals and Myrtle the turtle,” Snyder said.

“The aquarium is a beloved, iconic institution, and we just hope that we can be part of a really positive summer for the city of Boston as people venture out more.”

Museum of Fine Arts director of special projects and COVID-19 officer, Maggie Scott, described similar chal-

Two masked Emerson students enjoy art at a local museum. Lucia Thorne / Beacon Staff

lenges they faced at the MFA. “[We face] the same challenges that every institution faces, which is, ‘How do you bring people back to a place that is rooted in sort of a togetherness?’”

Scott said. “For museums, the entire purpose and way of being is a sort of shared experience, so ‘how do you make a shared experience something still valuable when you can’t really do it in the same way you used to?’”

To maintain close watch of the priceless artworks in the museum during the lockdown, the MFA staggered staff scheduling for security, ensuring that each pod would not interact with another, limiting potential community spread.

The COVID-19 safety measures the MFA currently uses are strict mask wearing policies, limited capacity, limited staff onsite (less than 50 percent), hand sanitizer stations placed strategically throughout the galleries, self-cleaning door handle coverings, and contact tracing.

Scott said that some MFA employees tested positive over the course of the pandemic, but none were attributed to community spread. They have received only one contact tracing call from the state.

The MFA closed from March 2020 to Sept. 2020, and closed again from December to early February. Since city and state guidelines aren’t necessarily the same, Scott said staying in accordance with local health restrictions has also been challenging.

“While we are really great at following all of the administration’s guidelines, knowing the intersecting guidelines be-

Social (life) distancing

Dana Gerber & Alec Kluza Beacon Staff

In the first semester of his sophomore year, junior visual and media arts major Devin Elias went to parties every other weekend and met with friends to watch horror movies once a week.

Now, in light of the social distancing measures instituted at the college, local, and state levels to curb COVID-19 infections, Elias regularly attends parties from the confines of his off-campus apartment over Zoom.

The now-ubiquitous video conferencing platform houses everything from Elias’ weekly horror movie viewings to his Among Us or Jackbox game nights, and to his PowerPoint parties, where each participant takes a unique prompt to create and present a slideshow.

Despite his creative use of technology, Elias said he can’t help but feel like something is missing.

“I kind of feel like I’ve lost a year of social life,” Elias said. “It’s much better to hang out with people in person.”

When students left Emerson’s campus last March, dorm parties, group Dining Center meals, and classroom connections were staples of the traditional college experience. Fast-forward: 12 months later students are prohibited from visiting residence halls they don’t live in, the Dining Center is primarily grab-and-go, and in-person class experiences happen— at most—once a week per course.

People relaxing on the Boston Common. Zhihao Wu / Beacon Staff

“I think the biggest impact is the loneliness factor,” Dr. Marcia Morris, a psychiatrist at the University of Florida with a focus on mental illness in college students, said. “One aspect of college we don’t talk enough about is that social aspect and the social development of young adults. And that to me is just as important as the academic development.”

In a survey conducted in Nov. 2020

by Emerson’s Institutional Research, just 65 percent of the 1,781 students who responded reported feeling “successful” or “somewhat successful” at making or maintaining connections with other Emerson students.

“It’s definitely been weird,” Lauren Hodgkins, a first-year theatre design/ technology major, said. “I’m not used to having to communicate mostly over technology rather than in per-

son. It’s been kind of hard to make deeper connections with people—the lack of personal connection that you get just through a screen versus faceto-face, which I feel is a lot more intimate.”

Some students, like Elias, have found ways to recreate their social lives in a virtual format over the past year. First-year communication studies major Giana Carrozza said she made a good friend at the college through a “matchmaking survey” organized by the college. “[The college has] done a good job of providing activities for people to go [to],” Carrozza said. “My RA is doing a lot of cute little get-togethers that you can join, like plant parenting.”

Dr. Morris said while she recommends finding ways to socialize out-

tween city and state and making sure that you’re on track with all those things can be difficult,” Scott said. “But we’ve also found these really great ways to sort of work in new ways.”

Scott said this task brought on better communication and collaboration between departments.

Scott also discussed the issues the museum has had to overcome in regards to the programming for the year. She said it was much easier for the MFA to transition to an online format since most of the artworks in the museum had already been documented virtually.

The MFA moved their cultural celebrations online and launched a new program called Soundbites, which are virtual concerts that take place in the museum’s galleries.

The MFA’s special exhibits are selling out quickly, with their Monet exhibit being sold out indefinitely, and their Basquiat exhibition selling out on the weekends. But ensuring the museum’s planning for these exhibitions was quite challenging during the past year, Scott said.

“What so few people realize with museums is how much international integration is required to put on these exhibitions,” Scott said. “The difficult part has been making sure that anything we commit to, we will be able to achieve without knowing if you know another country is going to be able to ship anything. You can’t really rely on those pieces of artwork getting to you. So now that thing seems to have stabilized, we’re actually able to do a whole lot more planning, and we’re able to do it really fast.” doors, social media and online tools have become advantageous.

“It’s been a lifeline,” she said. “My message to young adults would be, as we go through this pandemic and hopefully recover from it, continue to connect with others—whether it’s face-to-face or social media.”

William Hutton, a senior visual and media arts major, started having virtual game nights over Discord, an instant messaging program, with his friends to mitigate the lack of human interaction.

“I posted on my Instagram, ‘Let me know if you’re interested,’” Hutton said. “We did have up to 15 to 16 people in the Discord server at one time, everyone just kind of hanging out. Some of us drinking, some of us not.”

The online hang-outs became a medium to reconnect with old friends, Hutton said, as well as an opportunity to make new ones.

“I’ve moved around in my life a lot and I have a lot of friends from a bunch of different places,” he said.

“These people who wouldn’t have met each other are becoming friends—and we’re all getting drunk together.”

The online platform provides a level of socialization Hutton said he might not have broached offline.

“It lowers those social barriers in a way,” Hutton said. “People that I had never spoken to at a house party—I’m a naturally anxious person—I probably wouldn’t have approached them unless they approached me first. But in Discord, I can just talk and people will hear me regardless.”

For some, the effects of Zoom fatigue—a phenomenon The New York Times blames on the awkwardness of technology and lack of non-verbal

With all this programming, online and in-person, museum membership has remained rather steady, which Scott said helped the museum maintain some revenue.

“Many people kept their memberships during the time period and didn’t ask for extensions, which is incredibly generous,” Scott said. “We have a lot of really wonderful donors, including those on our board who have considerably helped over the course of the pandemic.”

The generosity of visitors and donors is what has allowed beloved institutions like both the MFA and the aquarium to stay afloat.

“This has been a very challenging time for the Aquarium as it has been for so many other cultural institutions,” Snyder said. “As things start to open back up and return to normal, we’re really counting on support from the public to make it to the other side of the pandemic through donations and through our ticket sales.”

Snyder and Scott both encourage people to visit safely, as it can be a nice escape from the current reality while everyone waits patiently for their turns to be vaccinated.

“We’ve proven after all these months of being reopened that we can do it safely and that it’s one of those few locations that lends itself to a safe experience,” Scott said.

“And for the people who really need a sort of community and a moment outside of their house and might not otherwise really encourage them to come and visit, because it can be really healing, it can be a really wonderful day for someone.” lucia_thorne@emerson.edu cues—are draining. That’s why Elias has lunch face-to-face with two of his friends every Monday. They book an on-campus room, alternate eating so only one person is ever unmasked at a time, and sit far apart.

“I really, really need that,” Elias said.

“Zoom is convenient, but I feel like you really need in-person hangouts, too.”

Emma Shacochis, a sophomore writing, literature, and publishing student, said making friends during class is still possible even with the hybrid learning style.

“Weirdly enough, breakout rooms have helped—maybe not necessarily [to] make friends, but [they] create the bond between classmates that was much easier in person,” she said. “People I know if they hang out with someone, they’ll just go to a public space.”

Ryan Rosenthal, a sophomore theater and performance major, said it’s been easier to maintain friendships rather than develop new ones.

“I made my friends last year, and I kind of just kept them,” he said. “I live in an eight-person suite. So, for the most part, we’re all together.”

Dr. Morris said despite the social isolation that has accumulated over the past year, she believes the release from it will be remarkable.

“After the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, we had the roaring 20s where there was more socialization, more partying among young people, which is totally understandable,” Dr. Morris said. “I hope there’s more fun when this ends and more connection. People are going to appreciate it and, hopefully, be more kind to others.” contact@berkeleybeacon.com

The Berkeley Beacon

Sports

Student athletes reflect on a year without Emerson sports

Kate Foultz bats in a game pre-pandemic. Courtesy Kate Foultz

Christopher Williams Beacon Staff

After returning to Boston from a preseason tournament in Arizona over spring break with the softball team last March, Sophia Cloonan eagerly awaited the beginning of her first season as an Emerson student-athlete—just days away.

“Then, like, someone flipped the switch and was like, ‘You can’t do this. You guys have to all go home,’” Cloonan said in an interview.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic forced the New England Women’s and Men’s Athletic Conference to cancel the spring sports season on March 12, 2020, and a day later forced Emerson to send its students home for the remainder of the spring semester. Over a year later, sports have yet to officially make their return to Emerson.

Student-athletes were left in limbo for over a year, unsure whether their respective teams would be participating in potential 2020-21 fall, winter, and spring sports seasons.

Jenna Van Pelt, a junior forward on the women’s soccer team, said she had mixed feelings about her

spring practices being canceled and the college sending students home.

“It was sort of nice to have a break for two seconds, knowing that I wasn’t going to be required to get up at seven in the morning [for practices],” Van Pelt said in an interview. “In some ways I was relieved, but in many other ways hectically confused.”

The confusion carried into the summer and fall semester for student-athletes like Cloonan, who said the softball team wanted nothing more than to know the fate of their season.

“We felt like there was a little bit of miscommunication because some people were like, ‘Oh my gosh, yes, we’re gonna have a season for sure,’ and others were like, ‘There’s no chance you guys are gonna have a season,’” Cloonan said. “We were kind of just caught up in the middle of everything waiting for definite answers.”

Emerson athletes found different ways to stay active amid the absence of competition. Cloonan said she took up kickboxing to fill the void, and Van Pelt created a virtual tag game to keep the women’s soccer team in contact.

“If you catch someone on the

street that’s on the soccer team and if you’re it for that week, you Snapchatted them a picture in the whole big group chat,” Van Pelt said. “It was a way to keep people still in check with each other, even though it wasn’t passing a ball.”

For other Lions like Phillipe Legagneur, a senior on the men’s cross-country team, it was difficult to cope with life without sports.

“Sports are kind of my only avenue of going outside, rest, and relaxation, and I really don’t have that,” Legagneur said in a phone interview. “I’ve been kind of playing video games like League of Legends and stuff like that.”

Van Pelt said she was optimistic during the summer about the potential of having a fall season, but said it was hard to stay motivated while training. “[Our coaches] still expected us to go out on these runs and do these beep tests, so they knew that we were still going to have something to run for,” Van Pelt said. “Not being sure about a season made it really hard to do anything that really would motivate you to do those running and during summertime on lockdown.”

Just as the pandemic canceled sports seasons for first-year student-athletes, it also brought an end to the athletic careers of seniors on Emerson sports teams.

The fall sports season would have been Legagneur’s final season on the cross country team. When he heard the news that Emerson canceled the season in July, Legagneur said he understood the decision but was saddened his career would be ending so soon.

“Cross-country is really one of those sports where you just can’t

have it going on during a pandemic,” Legagneur said. “A bunch of people running through five miles, breathing heavily, and in large packs, it just doesn’t sound like it fits right now. Especially after realizing what was happening, I was just like, ‘Well, this is just the way things have to be for everyone’s safety, but it also sucks that it needs to be this way.’”

Legagneaur said running with the men’s cross-country team was the most enjoyable time in his athletic career, and he hopes that the team continues to build on the foundation that he and his teammates set over his four years as a Lion.

“The Emerson cross-country team was the most fun I’ve had in any sport that I’ve played, and I’ve given 100 percent of my best,” Legagneur said. “The people that I ran with, we were running on the team since freshman year, and we’ve been trying to pick up the team to bring it back to a point where it was really good. But we’ve been getting less and less people to join, so I’m just hoping that that changes.”

The NEWMAC canceled the winter sports season on Nov. 2, leaving the men’s and women’s

March 18, 2021

12

sports season would take place.

To her surprise, the NEWMAC announced its plan to hold the spring sports season on March 1, and Emerson decided to opt in two days later. Cloonan said she’s excited for her first official season on the team.

“I’m pumped for the season; this is going to be a great one,” Cloonan said. “The team is looking pretty awesome considering the circumstances of not playing for a whole year, and it seems like it’s going to be a pretty epic season.”

She also said losing last spring season due to the pandemic has left her “in a learning stage” as she prepares to begin for her first collegiate softball season as a sophomore.

“It’s kind of strange because it feels like I’m just starting out now,” Cloonan said. “I still have to prove myself to be on the field and play with the rest of the team at their level. It’s definitely interesting playing now and getting a feel for how everybody else plays, the dynamic of the field, and just how a game would flow.”

Looking ahead to the future, Van Pelt said she’s confident the college and conference will allow her to

The women’s soccer team pre-COVID. Carol Rangel / Beacon Correspondent basketball teams without a season.

The men’s volleyball team, which competes in the Great Northeast Athletic Conference, did not have a season either.

Aware of the fates of the fall and winter seasons and the number of positive COVID-19 tests on campus, Cloonan said she was “wholeheartedly not confident” the spring

play in her senior soccer season in the 2021-22 fall sports season.

“Senior season would be an awful thing to not have just because that’s the whole reason we all kind of did it,” Van Pelt said. “I hate it for the seniors this year, but I’m pretty optimistic about ours.” christopher_williams@emerson.edu

Column: I’m lucky sports are the worst thing I lost

Joey DuBois (right) at a Red Sox game in 2019. Courtesy Joey Dubois Joey DuBois Beacon Staff Sports mean a variety of things to different people. While they may be trivial compared to the more serious aspects of life that are negatively affected by the pandemic—such as surging unemployment rates—sports still play an integral role in our society and in my life.

COVID-19 became real to me on March 11, 2020. It wasn’t when Tom Hanks announced he tested positive, or when we heard about our country’s mishandling of the virus from Dr. Anthony Fauci, or even when the World Health Organization declared

COVID-19 a pandemic.

For me and sports fans everywhere, COVID-19 became real when the National Basketball Association suspended its season.

Before that, I saw a mini-vacation forming before my very eyes, and at what better timing? March Madness was about to begin, and I got a free week off of classes to sit around and watch every game.

However, when Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz tested positive for the coronavirus after the team practiced in Emerson’s Bobbi Brown and Steven Plofker Gym just a couple days earlier, I realized the significance of

what was about to happen.

Professional sports leagues played through natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and even world wars. Yet, the coronavirus was the first thing to put a stop to sports right away.

The timing could not have been worse. I left campus in a hurry, bound for an indefinite quarantine in my childhood home of Uxbridge, Massachusetts. The worst part, though, was I couldn’t look forward to the Boston Celtics’ game that night. Or the night after that. Or, seemingly, for an eternity.

Sports have always been my escape from reality. Last spring, reality was as undesirable as ever, and my escape vanished.

Sports bring my family and me together like few other things. Whether it’s watching a game live or the (often) friendly debates afterward, it’s our go-to topic when a conversation dies down. Now, these conversations shifted to the surging numbers of cases and deaths, and who in our personal lives tested positive that day.

The quarantine boredom crept in and no amount of Netflix or PlayStation 4 games could make it go away.

Usually in times like these, I turned to sports, but it wasn’t always just to watch them. As a sports journalist, sports represent my creative outlet— they allow me to share my hot takes with those outside of my friends and family.

Without sports, there was nothing

new to cover. I was unable to even sit in front of a keyboard to write or a microphone to record a podcast. I was lost without sports, both as a fan and a member of the media.

My boredom was relieved when sports, specifically the NBA, returned in late July. However, many raised important questions about sports returning.

How did leagues gain access to enough COVID tests to test each player and coach every single day when average Americans were, and still are, unable to easily access tests?

Or, following the protests of the summer, why are these athletes dedicating their time to a game rather than advocating for social justice in light of George Floyd’s killing and the nationwide reckoning with police brutality it set off?

And, most importantly, why should anyone care about sports in the wake of so much tragedy?

When considering these questions and many more, I found myself questioning my own desires. Why did I care so much?

Sports were a beacon of hope for me in my darkest days. I never found concrete answers to any of the questions posed above. All I knew was that watching my favorite sports provided some sense of normalcy— something I and millions of other sports fans desperately needed.

Compared to many of my peers,

the pandemic has taken it easy on me and my loved ones. Outside of the dullness we all endured, I’m lucky enough to have not lost anyone I love to this terrible virus. Perhaps that is why the loss of sports jumps out at me when reflecting on this past year.

It would be irresponsible and ignorant for me to act as though the pandemic hit me the hardest just because I love sports. In reality, I know the loss of sports for a couple of months is not comparable to the suffering so many have endured due to the pandemic. Still, I know that the loss of the sports and the alienation I felt was real. The difference is, I knew it would be back.

Most professional stadiums are now allowing at least a few fans into games. Professional seasons are all back on schedule and championships are being crowned once again.

It’s not quite back to normal yet, but normalcy is undoubtedly on the horizon.

The pandemic taught me that sports mean even more to me than I thought, but it also showed me how fortunate I am that sports were my main concern.

As we slowly inch towards regularity, I think of those who dealt with far worse than me. I wonder what their escape is. If they’re not sure, I hope they’re able to find it. jose_rios@emerson.edu