Class of 2023: Resilience in a pandemic

The first-year students who arrived at Syracuse University in August 2019 were like any other class: excited, anxious and eager to figure out what their college experience would be.

The class barely had time to find Marshall Street before a pandemic spread a deadly virus called COVID-19 across the globe. Students left for an extended spring break in March 2020. When classes resumed, they did so on a new video platform called Zoom. Lab sciences and studio classes, piano lessons and public speaking, lectures and group projects and media productions – all happened, sort of and somehow, from wherever students and faculty spent the months-long national lockdown.

By sophomore year, students were back on campus. Masked. In-person classes were hybrid: half the students on Zoom and half in the room. Everyone learned new terms like “contact tracing” and “social distancing.” Students spit and spit and spit after SU opened a campus testing facility. They lived in residence halls, or in isolation at the Sheraton or South Campus. Hundreds of students got COVID. Thousands more got vaccinated. The university stayed open.

By junior year, classrooms were full again. The mask mandate continued. Students went abroad and orgs met in person. Still, SU’s campus felt wary, as though everyone waited for something to upset the fragile academic year. Those big-deal summer internships happened back in childhood bedrooms, as much of the rest of the country continued to work from home.

Seniors returned to campus in August 2022 that felt like the one they first imagined freshman year. Classes, clubs and off-campus living. Parties and bars and concerts and an unusually exciting football season. Coach Jim Boeheim retired and the winter was mild. It was just … a year. A gift.

On May 11, 2023, a few days before the Class of 2023 would graduate, the federal government ended the national emergency that started back in freshman year. The Class of COVID had a college experience unlike any other.