By Lindsay Emery
Today, I got a notification on my phone about my roommate’s senior research dinner. She had asked my whole apartment if we would want to see her present her research and convinced us to go by saying we would get free food. Little did I know that everything that the rest of senior year would be cancelled.
I miss my friends. I miss the nights of watching ridiculous television and going to ETC just before it closed to get dark chocolate almond bark. I miss our upstairs neighbors. A group of boys that had both vegetable oil AND butter when we had neither and wanted to make cookies from a box. I miss my professors, who have shaped the way I view the world, for better or for worse. I miss the smell of the fresh-cut grass on the quad when I walk to work in the morning.
I feel like these days hit me more than others. One thing will remind me of another and I spiral into thinking about better days on the University of Richmond campus. My friends and I used to look at our Google Photos and laugh at our past memories together. Now I look at our photos and it’s bittersweet. I really hope that we have a graduation just so I can say goodbye. I know I can’t be selfish. Recently, I’ve been thinking about the other grades.
For rising freshmen, they have never been to college before. They don’t know what they’re missing but is it worth paying for a school where you might be online for your first semester? For rising sophomores, they had just gotten a taste of what it was like — freedom. Now, you have to go back home and take classes online just as you were getting the hang of things. For the rising juniors, they were finding their place. I met some of my best friends sophomore year. I remember my friend that was a senior when I was a sophomore telling me that I should remember that you don’t have to stick with your freshman year friends. I’m still best friends with my freshman year roommate and others, but many of my other friends I met sophomore year. For rising seniors, this is devastating. The first semester of their last year of college might be taken away from them.
Everyone is making sacrifices right now. We need to remember to think about everyone, especially now. We shouldn’t be selfish, even though it is so hard not to be.