COVID-iversary Brings Refections

“People had to consider their courses in different ways, and as they learned new skills, they thought about pedagogy more,” said Prof. Justin St. Juliana, ecology and evolutionary biology. “A lot of courses — not just mine — have dramatically improved. We went through a hard time, but we walked away with valuable skills and information.”

At the same time that students were forced to leave campus, students in the Class of 2024 were receiving their acceptance letters to the University. Although campus tours, Cornell Days — an event for admitted students to meet potential classmates and sit in on lectures — and in-person senior years were not a reality given the health crisis, future Cornellians felt excited to be admitted, but nervous for what the Fall 2020 semester would look like.

Salma Hazimeh ’24 commented on her anticipation of the Fall 2020 semester — also her first semester at Cornell.

“Originally, I was a bit nervous [about coming to campus], because it was prior to the vaccine, so I wasn’t really sure how everything would pan out,” Hazimeh, who spent the semester on campus, said. “I was definitely still eager to go, just because I was excited to be on campus for the first time [and] have my first college experiences. But there was still this looming sense of concern over how the semester would pan out, especially when Cornell didn’t necessarily have all of the answers.”

Pollack announced on June 30, 2020 that Cornell’s campus would reopen for the Fall 2020 semester, offering a range of in-person, hybrid and online classes. In the announcement, Pollack said that students’ returning to Ithaca would be the safest option for public health, citing epidemiological modeling from a team led by Prof. Peter Frazier, operations research and information engineering.

“I trusted the administration here. They had done pretty sophisticated modeling that showed that we were going to be okay,” said Prof. Joseph Sullivan, sociology, who began teaching at Cornell during the Fall 2020 semester.

To ensure a safe return to campus, the University implemented numerous COVID-19 move-in policies. Before moving into on-campus housing, students were required to quarantine at home for 14 days. Upon arriving at Cornell, they received PCR COVID-19 tests and had to isolate in their dorm rooms or in hotels as they awaited their test results. For students who planned to live in residence halls and came from states on the New York State Travel Advisory list, a 14-day quarantine in New York or another state not on the list was required before arrival to campus.

Students also had the option of attending all classes remotely for the Fall 2020 semester.

“There was definitely concerns about whether or not school would be in-person,” said Althea Bata ’24, who was newly admitted into the University. “For safety reasons, I ultimately decided to be remote.”

Bata completed her classes from Staten Island, New York, and said she felt disconnected from the University and had to take a lot of initiative to get involved in campus organizations virtually. Since many of her peers in the Dyson School of Business decided to attend the semester in person, Bata said she experienced a “fear of missing out” before joining the Cornell community in person for the Spring 2021 semester.

For students who chose to come to campus in the Fall 2020 semester, they remember a campus riddled with regulations and social distancing requirements.

“I remember, in the dorm common rooms, we weren’t allowed to take our masks off, which is very reasonable. … Looking back, I’m definitely grateful for these restrictions, but I remember being a freshman and feeling super isolated,” Hazimeh said. “When I think about how huge Cornell is and how we had a relatively successful 2020 to 2021 year, I can better understand the administration’s no-tolerance policies and strictness.”

Throughout the 2020 to 2021 academic year, Cornell tracked the number of active cases per day on its COVID-19 dashboard. Though the University experienced several COVID-19 spikes and transitions to alert level yellow — instituting increased restrictions on student activity — campus remained open for the duration of the year.

Lewis Sisler ’25 said the way in which Cornell handled the pandemic, especially as compared to other universities, influenced his decision to come to Cornell in the fall.

“Looking at how [schools] had responded to COVID-19 initially was probably going to be telling of how they would respond to it later,” Sisler said. “And the fact that [some other schools] basically shut down and Cornell still conducted in-person classes and things like that was a reassurance that my college experience wouldn’t be miserable if [anything] happened with COVID-19.”

The Vaccines

As the first COVID-19 vaccine became available to New Yorkers aged 16 and older on April 6, 2021, many students and faculty were inoculated against the virus. Several days prior, on April 2, 2021, Cornell announced that it intended to require vaccination for students returning to campus for the fall, as well as several plans to resume in-person instruction according to levels of campus-wide immunity.