Today marks five years since the start of the coronavirus pandemic that brought the entire world to a screeching halt.

I’ll never forget sitting in the middle of my acting class when we got the email that we’d be going virtual for two weeks, and everyone was to evacuate campus by the end of the weekend. We were too distraught to keep going with our scene projects, so my professor released us early, and I’ll never forget walking into the dining hall for dinner that night. People were crying (myself included), people were calling their families and telling them to come pick them up, and the atmosphere felt super eerie. We all knew this would be more than just a two week ordeal; at best, we wouldn’t have a chance of coming back to campus and seeing each other until August. And for the next two days until I left, campus was dead silent. The next day, having nothing to do, I bought about $60 worth of snacks from Camelot so I could use up my dining dollars, I frantically tried to pack my entire dorm into a few plastic bins, praying to God there was enough space in my dad’s old car, and a day later, I did the Irish exit from campus. The moment we turned onto Madison Avenue, I knew life was never going to be the same again.

Funnily enough, I always joked to my parents when I was younger that I wanted to do college online. I always thought it would be fun to go to school in my pajamas and never have to sit in a classroom ever again. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Through no fault of their own (the entire world was home with nowhere to go), trying to work towards my degree online in a full house was no easy task. Not only that, I can’t help but feel like I wasn’t learning anything. I was just sitting through Zoom lectures, doing assignments, and getting good grades from professors who gave us all A’s because they felt bad for us. Of course, I still worked my butt off the next 2 years, but I can’t help but feel like I would have gotten much more out of my degree had half of it not been spent behind a screen.

Eventually we did return to campus, but the vibes were just never the same. So many clubs and programs that existed before the pandemic just never came back. One of my classes went hybrid so I had some in person learning, but otherwise, it was the same nonsense from quarantine, this time at least in the comfort of a dorm room. Many of the businesses and establishments shut down over the summer, so there weren’t too many places to go, you’d be kicked out of the school if you dared to throw a party, so I really got cheated out of my college experience. Saint Rose ended up discontinuing the legal internship program I was to start my junior year, so I never got to complete a legal internship and get some experience in the field. It wasn’t until my final semester of college, two years after all hell broke loose, that there was some sense of normalcy. I thank God that I was able to go out with my friends that semester, and that I was able to have a graduation and see my fellow classmates off.

It’s hard for many to think of the positive changes this pandemic brought about, especially when many people lost loved ones and couldn’t even be there to say goodbye, kids weren’t able to play with their friends and learn how to build friendships and relationships with others, seniors missed out on one of the most important milestones of their lives…need I go on? However, as awful as the pandemic was, it changed my life in certain ways that I almost wouldn’t have wanted things to happen any other way. For one, weeks before the pandemic started, I was beginning to plan a transfer to St. John’s University, thinking my dad had it right when we set foot in Carnesecca Arena on our tour and he told me it was the perfect school. After being bullied by my former friend group freshman year, I decided it was time to start over somewhere else. However, after being hours away from campus for some time, I realized how much I missed the school, and I decided to give Saint Rose another chance. I’m also glad the pandemic happened, because at the time, I was majoring in political science, and there was one professor who graded us even more harshly as a result of the pandemic, and that was my last straw before I switched to the criminal justice program. I was later recruited to the mock trial team, and I found my passion for law. And finally, the greatest thing that happened to me during the pandemic was my family using the extra downtime to adopt the four-legged love of our lives, Phoebe. She brought so much joy into our lives during such a dark time.

I pray we never have to experience anything like the pandemic again, but if there’s anything I’ve learned from it, it’s that everything happens in our lives for a reason, and sometimes what feels like life’s biggest curses are really our biggest blessings in disguise.