Social Distancing as a College Freshman

On Sunday, August 9th I moved halfway across the country in the middle of global pandemic, from a tiny town in rural Wisconsin to a crowded college campus near Asheville, North Carolina. It was a difficult decision for me because I had the option of postponing my admission and staying another year at home. I felt a responsibility to my family and community to do my best not to contract COVID-19 and potentially spread the virus to others. However, I decided to prioritize my mental health and attend anyway. Flash forward a couple weeks and I’m still not sure this is the right decision, still not sure whether any of the decisions I’ve been making in this time are the right ones. We’re all figuring this out right now, so I thought I’d share some of my experiences trying to physically distance in college in case they’re helpful to anyone else.

I’m lucky in terms of the college I’m going to; Warren Wilson College (WWC) is nestled in the Blue Ridge mountains in a rural area near Asheville, providing the opportunity to stay fairly clear of folks from the outside world (not that students necessarily take advantage of this.) With 1,1000 acres of land featuring forests, hills, a river, and a farm, there’s plenty of room to physically distance. It’s easy to socialize and even hold classes outside as well. North Carolina weather, especially in the mountains, is temperate and pleasant for most of the year and the culture of Warren Wilson is particularly encouraging of outdoor recreation. The population of WWC is small, making contact tracing and containment relatively easy compared to bigger schools. There are staffed quarantine facilities set up to house students who are (or may be) infected, and there are daily temperature check stations and numerous hand sanitizing stations set up around campus. However, there are many other precautions I wish they were taking, such as closing common indoor spaces, regularly testing all students, requiring daily symptom screening, not holding any indoor classes, and holding campus wide conversations about safety measures and physical distancing, but that’s not the point of this piece.

Despite the precautions that are being taken, it’s naive to expect a campus full of college students not to have parties, socialize in close proximity, drive into town to go shopping and get food, and spend time in each others’ dorms. In all honesty, I believe that for this reason there is no safe way to open a college campus. But that’s not the world any of us are living in, so I’ve been trying to adapt. I have a few strict rules for myself that make it easier to say no when things come up: no one else is allowed in my dorm room (I feel incredibly lucky not to have a roommate this year), I never enter anyone else’s dorm, I never attend a gathering of 10 or more people (except school functions), and I never share a car with anyone. I find that it’s really easy to bend my definition of physical distancing to suit my wants, so having these rules as a baseline is helpful to me. I would encourage others, college students or otherwise, to think about what the baseline safety precautions you take are, to think about them explicitly (maybe even write them down), and to share them with others. This will also help your friends/coworkers/peers/etc. better understand your needs.

In other situations, I’m a little more flexible. I limit my time in buildings I don’t live in and I try to spend as much of my social time outside as possible. I sanitize frequently, am mindful of the surfaces I touch, and keep my mask on unless I’m more than six feet from another person (with the exception of meals.) It’s common for students here to share meals unmasked, both indoors and out. I do this as well, but also take food back to my dorm frequently and eat meals indoors with others only if they’re already people within my social circle or that I live in close proximity with. It’s a balance, and there’s a lot of gray areas. There isn’t a cookie cutter solution that will work for everyone, nor is there a definite picture of what the “right” and “wrong” thing to do is.

Additionally, it sometimes takes a great deal of social confidence to stick up for your own physical distancing needs, and to express your levels of comfortability with others. It’s really hard to be the person that isn’t okay with whatever’s going on, and to make the decision to either speak up and ask others to change their behavior or remove yourself from the situation. I have definitely struggled with this. Sometimes I perceive that others believe that I’m physically distancing simply because I’m being a “rule follower” or am anxious about my own health. I often feel an urge to express that my reasoning is more about social responsibility. It’s a common trope that young people believe themselves to be “invincible,” and I think there is actually a great deal of truth to this narrative. Especially as a person who has never been seriously ill, I find it incredibly difficult to imagine my own mortality or even significant threats to my health, even though I am fully aware that they exist. This is why I feel so strongly about centering the idea of community care and social justice when talking about physical distancing measures. (Of course, this runs counter to the predominant individualistic ideology that already permeates American society, but we’re fighting that too.)

That said, I entirely understand the impulse for college students to break all the rules, to drive into Asheville to go thrift shopping, to share a pizza in a dorm room at 2 AM, to sit down by the river and pass around a joint, to hug each other and have parties and laugh maskless and have sex. I understand, and I never want to place blame on any individual student for the death and chaos this virus brings. It isn’t our fault that this pandemic took hold just as we’re stepping out into the world and learning our place in it. It isn’t our fault that our government has failed to adequately protect us and our colleges have been forced to make choices based on money instead of public safety. It is, however, our responsibility to address this crisis in our own lives, whatever that means for us. For me, it means finding out how to navigate my freshman year and make friends while physically distancing as best I can.

One of the most difficult things for me personally is continuing to prioritize social contact. I’ve never been one to forge friendships quickly or easily, and under stress I tend to gravitate towards self isolation. I’ve made conscious decisions not to struggle particularly hard against this impulse at this moment, because I know that the safest option is to keep the number of people and the duration of time I spend with them lower rather than higher. I am aware that this may lead to my eventually feeling lonely missing out on meeting people I might otherwise have connected with earlier, but I am also enjoying my own independence and am content at the moment to simply spend time with myself. It is a truly challenging shift in mindset for me, and presumably many others, to build and maintain relationships in a way that is safe, but it’s a shift I feel is crucial to work on.

Prioritizing relationships is important to all of us right now. It’s our friendships, social support systems and community connections that help us get through challenging and scary times. As a college freshman, I’m learning how to find my place in a new community and build relationships in a way that keeps others (as well as myself) safe from COVID-19. I’m hoping that others, at my college and around the country, are intentionally and thoughtfully asking these same questions.