Like everyone else in the world, I was not expecting my 2020 to be as such. This was supposed to be the year of change; I would finally put a period to my long high school years and start off an entirely new life as a college student. Senior prom, graduation, cocktail parties, a family trip to Turkey and Greece, freshmen orientation and the list goes on and on with the things I had been looking forward to so much. However, the reality did not grant me any of this and I was (voluntarily) confined to my room for three-fourth of the year.
I was in Brazil when the pandemic started and situations actually got downhill for me around mid-March. I remember how my friends and I talked about the virus as a foreign thing in my lastever high school trip in the beginning of March. But soon after that, it became too much of a reality for us. I found myself downloading Zoom on my laptop, my parents getting face masks for us and the IB cancelling exams. So many things changed so quickly. Now, after spending a little more than a year with the pandemic, I often reflect on how things were before. Although it is not an exaggeration to say that every single thing in our world changed in one way or the other, I think that relationships between people changed the most.
Last September, I started my college journey online at home. In other words, I entered an entirely new community where I knew no one. I did meet and talk to new people over Zoom from my courses, but when everyone was living in different timezones (my university is very diverse with people from all over the world) and only saw each other twice a week for an hour, it was hard to maintain that connection outside of Zoom. So my journey of actually meeting people started this January when I came to campus.
The first challenge was identifying people. It is indisputable that a lot of us look very different on camera compared to real life. And on top of that, when masks cover up half of your face, it is so difficult to recognize the face passing by, even if you have seen the person for months through Zoom. What is more, people’s heights are very unexpected. People who tend to slouch in their chairs were much taller than I was expecting from Zoom while others were so much shorter than on camera. I had to spend at least 3 seconds scrutinizing the faces of everyone before I could match their faces with the names.
Even when I managed to do this, the second hurdle was to decide how I should approach them. Should I just say hi? Should I introduce myself first? Would they remember me from Zoom? What if I look very different from Zoom and they don’t recognize me? And again, the list goes on with the millions of questions that zipped through my mind. My willingness to make new friends always clashed with my aversion to the potential awkwardness if the person failed to recognize me. Usually, I gave it a go and talked to them and lucky for me, no one failed to recognize me yet. So once I overcame this stage, I had acquaintances.
The next step has always been the hardest. For a deeper bond, we need to meet each other often. However, with fully online classes, it is not as easy as it sounds even if everyone is living on campus together. To sum up my experience, a lot of meeting friends had to be intentional. Having a meal together or going out off-campus with friends mostly happened when they were planned beforehand through texts. Without physical activities where I could gather with all of my friends, spontaneous hanging-outs were not easy. Hence, there was much effort needed to be put into planning where to go, who to go with and when to go every time I met someone.
These were some of the thoughts that go through my mind every time I step outside to my campus. As a college freshman in the middle of a pandemic, virtual relationships are weird and different from what I have imagined. But after spending about 3 months here, I am getting used to it. These difficulties of making virtual relationships are real for all of us and even though the situation is not the most pleasant, we all try to be more active and approach others first to keep alive the little socializing allowed now. What are your experiences with meeting new people in the midst of COVID?