Hi, my name is Allison. I’m one of WNUR News’ co-directors. I’m also WNUR News’ only senior, meaning I started at Northwestern in 2020.
I graduated from high school in Austin through a combination of Zoom ceremony and drive-through diploma pick up. This was June 2020, during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. That summer, everyone held their breaths as we heard news of various colleges canceling move-ins. Then on Friday, August 28, 2020, just a week before move-in, we received an email.
*voice memo of me reading the email*
The college move-in experience we had long awaited was gone in an instant. With it went the entire freshman year experience. Instead of starting classes and clubs, I Zoomed into my lectures while working 20 hours a week at my food service job. And instead of doing Wildcat Welcome with my peer advisory group in person, we met almost every day on Zoom.
Northwestern calls their freshman orientation “Wildcat Welcome,” and they organize incoming students into peer advisory groups, or PA groups. Each is led by two older students and are divided by school. In the Medill School of Journalism, however, your PA group members are also your classmates for the first-year journalism sequence. Which meant I would be spending a lot of screen time with these people.
HANNAH COLE: My initial impression of our PA group was that everyone was super nice I mean we were on Zoom. So I think I was like kind of desperate to make friends.
That’s Hannah Cole, a senior studying journalism and legal studies. Other people seemed to agree with her take.
JENNA WANG: I feel like our peer group initially was like, pretty close out of all the other middle pay groups that I think existed.
That’s Jenna Wang, a senior studying journalism, political science and integrated marketing communications.
JULIANNA ZITRON: I think we all clicked pretty quickly because we were some of each other’s first friends… we weren’t like meeting other people around campus or like getting to meet other people at like, you know randomly.
That’s Julianna Zitron, a senior studying journalism and political science. She brought up a good point in that as freshman in 2020, we had a very different PA group experience than classes that came before and after us.
CARLY WITTEMAN: I mean all of Wildcat welcome was virtual for us and like we weren’t being welcomed 10 days they were like 10 days before they were like don’t come to campus actually.
That’s Carly Witteman, a senior studying journalism and English literature.
BRAEDYN SPEIGHT: it felt like work more than fun, if that makes sense to be like on Zoom for all of those hours doing orientation activities, because a lot of them didn’t really make sense because we weren’t on campus.
That’s Braedyn Speight, a senior studying journalism and political science.
ARDEN SHAO: I do wish that we had more time to spend in person together…since a lot of meetings were done over Zoom we kind of really got to, we got to see into each other’s rooms. So that kind of gave an indication of personality. So I think that was sort of it interesting side effect of it being zoom.
And that’s Arden Shao, a senior studying computer science.
It was definitely weird getting to know people over Zoom, and then meeting them in person months later. And some of the Wildcat Welcome activities designed to endear us to Northwestern didn’t really take effect.
WITTEMAN: You know, I still don’t know all the words to the Northwestern fight song.
SPEIGHT: The fight song’s a really good example. I don’t know the words to that.
ZITRON: I think a lot of people in our year have a little less school spirit than other years like we never learned the fight song.
Despite all this, it seemed like we had an okay freshman year. And while not all of us still hang out, some actually do keep in touch. For example, Cole and Zitron are close.
COLE: Julianna, I see her all the time…Will, Braedyn…
ZITRON: I still regular hang regularly hang out with Hannah a lot. We went abroad together and freshman and sophomore year we took a class together every single quarter.
Speight and Witteman are some of the members that I keep the best in touch with.
SPEIGHT: I talk to Allison who is doing this story. I talked to Will Clark, who was in the PA group. Probably the most. And I feel like that’s really interesting. Because again, when we were in the Zoom Room now I never said a word I never spoke so it’s interesting that like now we speak but at the time, you know, I’d never would have like guessed.
WITTEMAN: I hang out with you? Um, we have gone to the Glossier store together. We’re going to the American Girl doll cafe…those are like, central girlhood locations. Um, otherwise I just sort of like yeah, like, I’ll say hello, when I see people
Even Shao and Wang, who said they aren’t really close with PA group members, say they like saying hi when the opportunity comes up.
SHAO: a lot of my friends that I have right now I made sophomore year. But I do recognize some of y’all and so oftentimes soldiers say hi on passing each other on the street.
Now, almost four years later, many former members of PA group 149 are poised to graduate. Some are continuing their education, while some are starting at jobs. Reflecting on their lives in freshman year, all had some good advice.
SPEIGHT: I think one thing I would tell myself from the fall, is that how you’re feeling that fall isn’t going to be a reflection of how you feel the next four years.
ZITRON: You’re actually really going to enjoy college, and you’re going to meet people that you will be friends with for a very long time.
COLE: I would tell myself not to be as scared about making friends.
SHAO: Don’t worry about classwork so much. And just go out and go to brand more random events and just meet more people.
WANG: I think now as a senior I think I’ve come to appreciate that like, like, life never really goes, how you imagined it to be like expectations never really 100% come true.
As I record this today in May of 2024, graduation is less than a month away. What I’m struck by now is how much we were able to jam four years of college into a much shorter time. We didn’t have any of the experiences of the classes that came after us. They didn’t have the mandatory weekly testing at the Jacobs Center, the daily symptom tracker, the 4pm curfew, the endless walks around and around campus with friends since there was nothing better to do.
But we made the most of it. As murky as things looked in September 2020, we made it out just fine.
For WNUR News, I’m Allison Rauch.
