My Second First University Day

By: Judith Uttendorfer
@judith_utd

It’s a whole different vibe on campus now than during the one semester I spent at university before COVID started.

While nothing seems to have changed except that we now cover our faces with masks (which makes it genuinely hard to understand what my classmates are saying), going back to campus and face-to-face classes still feels like a new life.

I’m a junior now, but I still can’t find my classrooms – a fact not made easier by the realisation that I, a Political Science and Music double major, suddenly discovered them to be in the School of Science and Engineering (SSE). And where I was always able to find someone in the hallway who knew the place better than I did when I was a freshman, the chances to find someone able to help have grown much slimmer this semester.

It is a strange feeling to walk past people I’ve known for a year but not recognise them because the reality differs so much from the camera perspective. These thoughts are shared by our professors, who may not know whether one of the students sitting in front of them took their course during the pandemic semesters.

I was one of the few privileged students to have an exception for my music class, allowing it to be held face-to-face in the past year. It did give me the chance to visit campus once a week during the last semester, but the usual fun experience was missing. The campus was empty and there were only very few students walking around.

So, despite that opportunity, I feel like I’m now seeing AUC for the first time a second time. Having been gone so long allows me to discover campus – anew. The gardens are much more colourful than I remember, the plaza much brighter, and the cats much more visible.

But in spite of this experience that we had all been waiting for, everyone now seems so cautious. Not in regards to Covid, but rather in a sense that if we take just one wrong step, the dream of life-back-to-normal will burst and we will again be seeing each other through Zoom. 

With a majority of students on campus not wearing masks and at the same time sitting so close together that one could believe they were almost in each other’s laps, I am not very confident we’ll stay on campus for very long.

That’s the reason I want to enjoy every day to the fullest and take everything I can from the face-to-face classes before the professor and my classmates become grey icons on my screen again.