By Cristina Gonzalez

Often when we are teaching, we only see our students for a few hours each week. What were they experiencing during Covid-19 that we didn’t see? Four students have agreed to tell their stories about the past year; watch Math Values this week for a glimpse into the lives of our students.  

Cristina Gonzalez is a Mathematics and Spanish double major on the licensure track for Secondary Mathematics. She’s a rising senior at Mount Holyoke College.

Tell us about your experiences as a student during Covid-19.

At the beginning of the pandemic last year in 2020, I was just starting my second semester of my sophomore year on campus. When we heard that coronavirus was spreading fast, the school made a decision from one day to the next that we would be required to return home and finish the semester remotely. I don’t think the severity of Covid had hit me yet. As a low-income student, I was just worried how I would get enough money to buy a ticket home with only a few days’ notice, to pay for storage, and how I would find transportation to take me to the Boston airport. Thankfully, with the help of alums, I was able to pay the unexpected expenses.

At the same time that I returned home, my sisters were told they would no longer have classes in person. My family would have to figure out how we would manage the limited space for online learning. In the end, I ended up having to work in our RV as the youngest needed to use my room.

While it was difficult to quickly adapt to online learning, I only had a month left to finish the semester, and my professors were also forced to make a quick turnaround.

Junior year was another story. Given that I was studying remotely at my house, there was a three hour time difference and so I found myself having to wake up at 5 am for a math class and stay up late trying to finish my homework for all my classes. This time, I was taking my classes in my room, with poor wifi and a noisy house. Not only was I worried about passing my classes, but I was also concerned about how I was going to pay my tuition without a job and how I was going to help my dad out financially since I was living at home. While this was stressful, it wasn’t anything that was impossible to handle.

As the semester came to an end, I made the decision to return to campus in the spring so that I would be able to work, I would have better health insurance through the school, I would have sufficient food available, and I would be able to just focus on school.

I went back to school knowing that we would be required to quarantine for two weeks as would every other student on campus. That was fine. I would be able to manage.

However, the two weeks soon turned into almost a month because of several cases in my residence hall. I am an immunocompromised person, so I was dealing with the stress of sharing spaces with other people, taking three math classes and a fourth Spanish class, and working twenty hours a week. I had already missed three appointments with my rheumatologist since being away from my doctor in Massachusetts and my bone pain was exponentially increasing. While my friends lived right next to me, I could not go into their rooms or eat dinner with them because of the extended stricter quarantine. After being home with my family for a whole year, I was suddenly physically isolated, unable to socialize or see anyone about my health issues, and confined to a small space. While it made sense since neither the school nor I wanted to have more cases, it was quite difficult and frustrating to be left in the dark.

Dealing with my immunocompromised self, working 20+ hours each week, anxiety from sharing spaces with close contacts, and being alone affected my ability to be fully present and attend to my academics. I remember there being a week in which I could not gather enough energy or motivation to go to class as I felt that everything else was going wrong, so what more could one more wrong thing do to me.

Even in my lowest, I was surrounded by understanding professors and my family who always called or texted me. But, in the end, it was my own determination to be the first to graduate college from my family that forced me to work through it.

Did you seek help from others?

I didn’t necessarily seek help from others, at least not by choice. My parents and professors were the ones who would reach out to me as they noticed my absences, my late work, my general tiredness. They were understanding and helpful in the sense that they would give me extensions and work with me after class, over the weekend, or late at night via email so that I would not fall behind.

I specifically remember that two days after the school had announced that we would have to leave campus and return home to finish the Spring semester in 2020, my statistics professor, who was also a Mount Holyoke alum, asked us to meet with her at her office. I don’t remember her exact words, but she made sure we knew that we would not be alone, that she understood our fear of what was going to happen and our frustration at the circumstances. And as some of us cried, because we did not know what would happen once we left for home, she cried with us and made us feel that we were not alone.

What did you tell your professors?

I told my professors exactly what was happening, sometimes not telling them everything at once as I felt they would think I was lying. However, each time I told them something else, they were comforting and understanding. I just wish I could have told them sooner instead of dealing with it on my own.

What did you learn from this experience?

These experiences of remote learning while dealing with health issues made me realize a few things: most professors don’t know what we are dealing with unless we tell them, most professors are understanding and will give extensions, and that it is okay to not be okay.

What would you like to tell your peers?

Reach out to professors, your friends, your family. Fight for yourself to get the things you need to survive and succeed. Fight for others to get what they need. Be understanding and compassionate with others. There is almost always an end to the bad.

What would you like your instructors to know?

To my future instructors: That it's hard to reach out to them when we are dealing with personal issues. That we don’t all have a perfect home with all the necessities. That some of us just cannot spend every minute, or any minute, trying to understand what we are learning and submitting assignments, especially when dealing with things. We have a life and problems outside of academics.

To my past instructors: Thank you. Thank you for being patient and understanding with me throughout the year. There were moments in time that I felt I would not be able to finish the semester, that I would rather just withdraw because I was at times five weeks behind on material. Without them, I wouldn’t be able to say that I am just one year away from being the first of my family to graduate.