All it took was a single blink for us to time travel all the way to April. Now here we are, registering for fall classes is around the corner and we’re a block away from finals. Nevertheless, like most online freshman students this year, my experience is best known as Stevens Lite. Labs done through iMovie, classes at the funkiest hours because of time zone differences, and being on Zoom or just generally online upwards of seven hours a day … The learning curve was frightening initially but now it’s to the point where, oddly enough, a small part of me is going to miss waking up at 5 a.m. to do classes half awake. The only thing I will not miss is answering polls at those hours because listening to them is one thing, but thinking through a chemistry problem is something else entirely.
The unique thing about all of this is that when things do have some semblance of normalcy, we’ll have two sets of freshmen on campus — the new freshmen, class of 2025, who have never experienced college before, and the infinite freshmen, part of the class of 2024, who started off online and experienced Stevens Lite. I highly doubt you’ll be able to tell them apart at first glance. Personally, I know for a fact that the layout of campus is still as new and foreign as it always was, and that I have barely any clue what each building’s purpose is, and how to get from one to another. If someone said, right now, “I need you to map out the most time efficient path from Babbio to Pierce because this is a hypothetical situation where I’m proving you don’t know any campus geography,” all I’d say is “Yeah, you don’t even really need to prove it because I’m pretty sure everyone at this point gets that all I know is that there’s just a lot of brick at Stevens.” And if they left and someone else came along and said “What is the cheapest way to get to the Empire State Building? I’m asking because this is another hypothetical scenario where you inevitably end up not knowing the answer and I’m trying to help hit it home that you don’t know anything about public transportation in the New Jersey/New York area,” I’d tell them “I really think it’s a little redundant and meta at this point but it’s something I could totally Google when I get there.” Basically, with the help of the Internet, it’s not an impossible situation, but I’ll still be one of the infinite freshmen when I get back to campus.
So cheers to everyone who has made the best of Stevens Lite. To those who have had to take tests or attend classes at the most inconvenient times, who are looking forward to finally experiencing the brick in real time, and have no clue where to go once they get there. You’ll hardly be alone in this Stevens Lite to Stevens Pro update. And even if you are, just remember there’s always the Internet.
Mind of a Freshman is an Opinion column written by a current first-year Stevens student to discuss life experiences during their time at Stevens, and other related subject matter.
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