By Erica Rigoroso
The beginning of the COVID-10 pandemic changed the lives of millions around the world, including the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
COVID precautions created a physical distance between students and professors as quotidian campus life came to an abrupt halt in March of 2020, and classes migrated online.
But more than just physical distance separated students from campus life. Students at UMBC and other colleges experienced a mental distancing; not just from other students, but from feeling part of a campus community.
Have students—and the university as a whole—recovered from the disruptions caused by COVIID?
Trevor Jansen, a UMBC alumni who lived on campus in 2020 during the COVID lockdown said that he felt that UMBC managed the sudden transition to online learning from in-person classes.
Jansen states the lockdown was handled “about as well as they could have considering the circumstances. The transition to online learning wasn’t seamless, but they managed to keep the school year going without any major disruptions.”
He pointed out that not only student, but professors too had to adapt very quickly to a new way of teaching and learning.
“It seems like professors were kind of thrown in the deep end and expected to swim with their classes.”
Jansen says that he found it harder to connect to students and professors during online classes and meetings.
“Things definitely felt more distant with online learning,” he said.
“There was much less incentive to pay attention in class, and group activities were even more awkward online than they were in person. I got to the point where I would just leave a class if they started putting us into breakout rooms.”
Though he said that he had some good classes during the online period with memorable professors, “I don’t remember them nearly as well or as fondly as the professors I got to see and meet with in person.”
Fellow UMBC alumni Michael Fialkowski offers a slightly different take on how UMBC handled the sudden jump to online classes.
“I felt so bad for the less tech-savvy professors; turns out its difficult to teach when you can barely work a Zoom room. I feel that it’s easy to forget how far everyone’s digital literacy has come since we were forced online for school and work, and we had to figure out how to do videoconferencing on the fly.”
Fialkowski feels that the school could have done more to address the mental health effects of the pandemic for students.
“I also know that those times were tough on the mental for many – but as far as I know we didn’t receive much guidance on seeking out counseling or other mental services.”
COVID-19’s impact on college students
A collaborating team of researchers from Chinese and American universities conducted a study on 335 college students monitoring their mental health experiences from the start of the pandemic in 2020 to two years later in 2022.
The researchers wanted to examine the way that emotions like fear and happiness were connected to university students’ mental health and these effects on their education.
Participants were screened for psychological disorders and answered questions that would measure their anxiety, depression, hostility, interpersonal sensitivity, and sleep symptoms over the two-year study.
Other factors considered by researchers included which students received the COVID-19 vaccine and students testing positive for COVID. 60% of students tested positive for COVID, with more female students than male students being affected.
The results of the study presented a correlation between the effects of the pandemic and college students’ mental health and education.
Participants showed an increase in feelings of fear, stress, and decreased happiness, with a reported 95.7% of the sample reporting and experiencing moderate to severe mood disorders.
In turn, the self-reported decline in mental health took a toll on how participants were able to retain information from class. Students reported an average score of 7.6 on a scale of 10 rating how much COVID affected their ability to learn during the pandemic, with 10 being the most severe.
Another group of researchers reported their findings on COVID’s effects on 4,714 college students in New York and New Jersey, the largest and most diverse sample of college students as of April 2022.
The researchers studied the psychological, academic, and financial health of college students, along with paying attention to how racial and ethnic groups may have had different experiences during the pandemic.
They conducted a survey for the students, which included a broad range of topics, such as COVID-related stressors, social behavior, and financial, academic, and mental health changes.
A large number of students reported changes in socialization both with their families and on social media, with 73% reporting less interaction with their friends and families, and 75% reporting more social media use compared to before the pandemic.
In addition to the lessened levels of socialization among participants, most students reported a decline in their mental health. 74% of students reported feeling more depressed, 76% felt more anxious, and 83% experienced more frustration or boredom.
Moreover, the shockwaves from the initial changes from the pandemic can still be felt by students in both their academic and social lives.
The Return to Campus
Eighteen months after the initial lockdown, UMBC opened its doors to in-person classes and residence halls at full capacity during the 2021 Fall semester.
At UMBC’s annual Fall Opening meeting in 2021, Provost Philip Rous said, “I feel like I’ve waited a very long time to say this, but… welcome home.”
Though some older students were returning to campus, and to their sense of “normal college life,” many new residents were experiencing college for the first time in a post-quarantine world.
The 2021-2022 school year welcomed almost 2,100 new students to UMBC—the largest incoming fall class in UMBC’s history.
What did it mean for students to come out of high school fully online and then come out into the world beyond the extent of COVID precautions?
Jonah Sichelman, a third-year student who came to UMBC as a freshman in Fall 2021, expresses the kind of social anxiety he felt in the transition from high school to college.
“My entire last year of high school was online and I wasn’t leaving the house much at all then, so I had definitely gotten used to note being around people or not making new friends,” he said.
Despite his worries, Sichelman felt welcomed by the UMBC community and connected with others because of this shared experience.
“It was surprisingly much easier to make friends than I thought it would have been because of how things had been beforehand. Living on campus made it surprisingly easy to make friends and meet people despite being in the middle of a pandemic.”
As a returning student, Fialkowski felt not just relief about coming back to campus, but also a sense of gratitude. He believes that the struggles that the UMBC community faced as students and faculty experiencing quarantine brought people closer together.
“Once we came back to campus, I felt that my classmates and professors took more care to connect with one another, and I had noticeable better relationships post-lockdown,” he said.
“Maybe it took a pandemic to recognize that we shouldn’t take our relationships – no matter how small – for granted.”
Erica Rigoroso 