On March 16, 2020, the governor of Pennsylvania issued a state-wide stay at home order due to concerns surrounding the spread of COVID-19. Up until this point, the Grove was one of the last schools to remain open. But with this order, it was finally forced to close its doors and move to online classes. However, some students could not go home. Whether it be due to travel restrictions, high-risk family members, or simply living in a time zone too distant from Grove City to make online classes possible, these students remained. The 30 or so of us stuck on campus nicknamed ourselves “The Remnant.” During my time with The Remnant, I journaled about what life was like.
When we last left off in this series, I had been battling with the habit of procrastination.
March 26th, 2020
In the spirit of breaking procrastination, I’m writing this directly after the previous entry. Hopefully I can channel this energy into other fields than just my recreational writing. Today was great. I slept in once again (a growing theme for Tuesdays and Thursdays). I went to lunch with my Resident Director and some guys from my hall. It’s been fun getting to know the three of us still in my dorm. I headed back to my dorm around 12:30 to get ready for class. Because of how behind everyone else is with their projects, professor Bandy gave us today’s class period to work on projects. However, because Matt and I are so far ahead, we didn’t have much to do. We ended up making some very small adjustments for the purpose of preparing for the next edit. After class, I headed down to lower campus to play volleyball. Despite my obvious lack of skill, we still had a great time. I found myself abusing my height advantage to the best of my ability. At one point, our ball rolled into the river and myself and another guy went on an adventure to retrieve it. I have re-learned the pains of walking bare-foot across gravel. After volleyball, I came back to my room and took a nap. It was a lovely nap, but one that was sadly cut short in its prime as I had another class at seven. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that McNulty curved our grades up by a fairly large margin because he had made the test harder than he meant to. I had done fine on the test even before the curve, but it was still nice. -Jacob
The spirit of camaraderie that developed between everyone during this time was great. A shared burden like that of our isolation from the rest of the world did much in the way of bringing us together. I have remained close friends with several of The Remnant to this day. We will occasionally have game nights or grab lunch to stay in touch. I always try to find the silver linings in things, and in the case of COVID-19, that silver lining was definitely the friends I made in The Remnant.
Stay tuned for further installments of The Remnant!
