My College Experience - Fall '20
I wanted to start an episodic set of posts where I go through my college experience. This will be a good opportunity to reflect on some of the biggest events and some of the most important years of my life. I will post these in chronological order and slowly reflect on the impact that my college experience has made.
~~~
I am sure that even just the year gives away what had the biggest impact on my college career. My college career began at Iowa State University (ISU) for Computer Engineering only months after it felt like the entire world shut down. I moved into the dorms about a week before classes started. My roommate had moved in earlier, and being an Iowa native, she already had a good lay of the land.
Moving to College
Moving into the dorms was quite an experience. I was moving in the day after the dreaded Derecho storm that came through. If you are living in the Midwest or know others in the Midwest, you probably heard about this storm. Boy, did it leave quite a trail behind it! We actually drove through the storm on our way across the Mississippi into Iowa. Stopping in Iowa City to see family quickly turned into a massive cleanup of many yards in the neighborhood. But after all that and a night of no power in my relative's house, we headed to Ames.
When we arrived in Ames, the first stop was the mandatory COVID test. Wahoo to that. The line was ridiculously long, probably because we had to be 6 feet apart from each other. It took a long while before a swab was shoved up my nose (I really don’t enjoy COVID tests). Then we made our way to the dorm, collected the keys, and started hauling things up the stairs. Moving into the dorms without knowing whether the test was positive or negative was strange, but we wouldn’t find out until two days later since there was such a huge number of students they were processing tests for.
My parents stuck around for a bit before I went off to get ready for the ISU Marching Band auditions. Being on campus was a million times better because of band camp and spending time with people with similar interests. I was also immediately introduced to people in my same department of engineering through the band. This seriously helped to calm any nerves I had regarding classes and all the scary unknowns.
Starting classes should have been more nerve-wracking than it was, but almost all of my classes were online. I had one MWF (Monday-Wednesday-Friday) class and two TTH (Tuesday-Thursday) classes in person. Marching Band was in person, but being outdoors, we had a little more flexibility.
College Dorm Life
With all the online classes, I really got to dive deep into the dorm life. Remember that mandatory COVID test I had to take when I moved in? Throughout the whole semester, if you became exposed to COVID or tested positive for COVID, there would be a couple of guys in white Hazmat suits that would show up at your dorm door, tell you to pack your things, and they would take you to another dorm on campus. There was a “COVID dorm” for those who tested positive and a “quarantine dorm” for those who were exposed. I only watched the Hazmat guys collect someone once, and she lived a few doors down from me. I hoped that there would never be any visits from the Hazmat guys as I heard plenty about other people being “taken away.”
During my time in the dorms, I got to know many of the girls on my floor. We would meet up at the dining halls quite often for meals and just to get out of our dorms. While the dining hall food was fine for a few months during the year, we all missed real cooking. We started looking at apartments later in the semester and committed to an apartment complex 10 minutes from campus.
To get to know each other better and hang out a bit more in the dorms, my roommate and I would host movie nights every once in a while. During the fall semester, we ended up watching all the Marvel movies in chronological order, from Captain America to Endgame. There were many tears and many bags of popcorn throughout those nights. It also shocked me how many of the people who joined us hadn't seen the movies before.
Marching Band
I had said before that having band before classes started was super important and very beneficial for me. This was by no means an ordinary season. I did not wear the official uniform, we did not march on the field at the games, and many of us had modifications to our instruments throughout the season.
Not to mention, being a band of 400, we split into a cardinal and a gold band for COVID regulations. This meant that we met half as often, learned about half as much drill, and attended half the football games. We didn’t even get to interact with the other half of the band that much. The very first football game had no fans aside from parents and family members of the team, so they let the band fill the entire visiting side of the stadium, all 400 of us, to play throughout the game.
With this semester mainly online, I felt I missed out on a lot of “normal freshman-in-college” things. However, the experience was a good way to ease into my college career. Since I had never marched in a band before, the experience I gained from only doing half the amount of band as a usual season was a very good way for me to ease into what a college marching band is like.
Reflecting
You’d think that sounds like a pretty crazy first semester. The other thing that made this semester so different compared to others was that the Fall '20 semester was only 14 weeks long rather than 16. We started the semester a week earlier than normal and ended it before Thanksgiving. This led to us having a full two months off between semesters. So, I chose to take a six-week Calc 2 course through ISU online during that time. This was only the start of all the courses I took outside of normal semester time.
So, there were some silver linings to the negative parts of this experience. I created a much stronger bond with those around me because of how close we were all the time. My roommates and floormates became some of my best friends. The biggest thing was I could focus more on getting classwork done instead of activities. This was very different compared to my high school life.
~~~
Each semester at Iowa State had different quirks and challenges. I am excited to continue sharing my semester experiences with you as we work through these reflections. Spring ‘21 next!