Opinions

Following Brown’s closure due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, 16 Brown student organizations called on the Undergraduate Finance Board to donate unused funds from these organizations’ annual budgets to mutual aid efforts to support members of both the Brown and Rhode Island communities.

Over the past four years, my professors taught me about the history of museums, how to read like a writer and to question who has the right to tell what stories.

A couple days before classes started last fall, I learned that my grandmother was dying. She was the oldest member of my family, but we did not expect such a rapid decline in her health.

Anticlimactic. That is the descriptor most used when discussing graduation for the class of 2020.

The coronavirus has radically changed the last three months of my college experience by ending in-person classes, making me leave campus and postponing my graduation.

For many adults, the end of the pandemic will be marked by apparent normalcy. Control over the novel coronavirus (whether in the form of a vaccine, herd immunity, or comprehensive contact tracing) promises the cessation of mass death, yes, but also the return of familiar routines.

My mind has never thought as an ordered set of instructions. I always have a jumble of thoughts in my head, reminders to do laundry next to overdue problem sets on top of pleas from my mom to CALL MY GRANDPARENTS.

In their May 15 letter to the editor, the Executive Board of the Undergraduate Council of Students appealed to the Brown community that the Class Coordinating Board is not an official form of student government: 

I am technically part of the class of 2019.5. But because I graduated a little early, I decided to spend spring semester on campus, remaining engaged in the communities I have come to love at Brown.

I remember being wide-eyed and nervous. My stomach was in knots, yet my heart was warm and full of anticipation. My parents and I had decided to take a road trip from my home in North Carolina to Providence, Rhode Island for my college move-in.