Washington Monthly - September/October 2020 - 16

Zoom University
Nine students share how the pandemic
has affected their studies-
and their futures.
By Nicole Girten, Giulia Heyward, and Ellie Vance

KIRA ALBIEZ
AGE: 26
SCHOOL: Johns Hopkins University
School of Nursing (Baltimore, MD)
PROGRAM: Master of Science, nursing
(accelerated program)
STATUS: Recent graduate

ira Albiez's final semester of
her nursing master's program at
Johns Hopkins was supposed to be focused on getting hands-on practice,
shadowing nurses in clinics and hospitals. "The clinical portion of our classes is really important-it's where we
learn to interact with patients," she
said. When hospitals implemented social-distancing measures, and her program shifted to mostly online classes,
that real-world training was dramati16 September/October 2020

cally scaled back. It happened in other
programs, too. "I have friends at other nursing programs who aren't even
getting to do any in-person trials," she
said. She credits her school for finagling a way to get students into hospitals and clinics, even if their hours
were greatly reduced.
There have been other drawbacks.
Some of their remaining course work,
which would have typically involved
role-playing scenarios with a dummy
or an actor as the patient, didn't translate well to online learning. It was isolating to no longer see her classmates
and friends. "This program, like most,
is super intensive and really, really
hard work," she said, but it's usually
made more manageable by the camaraderie. "It's weird to not see some of
those people anymore." It helps, she
said, that she's dating someone who's
also in nursing school and knows what
she's going through.
After graduating in August, she's
lined up to start working as a nurse
at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. She's
excited to finally start helping on the
frontlines, but she also feels a bit of
trepidation. "Part of me is, like, missing out on these last few months of
clinical experiences puts me in a weird
spot where I don't feel as prepared."
-GH

SILVIA ROJAS
AGE: 22
SCHOOL: Trinity University
(San Antonio, TX)
PROGRAM: Bachelor's, marketing
and political science
STATUS: Senior

n early March, Silvia Rojas left Texas for
a semester abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She was excited to explore the city,
and the larger region, but three weeks after
her arrival she found herself quarantined
indefinitely. Argentina went into lockdown, banning nonresidents from traveling, to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
Her study-abroad program was canceled,
and the opportunity to travel was gone.
Luckily, Rojas had an uncle in Argentina
who let her stay with him, but his apartment building didn't technically allow visitors during the lockdown. She was able to
get into the building, but didn't want to
risk leaving. "We're just scared that if I go
out and I want to go back in, they're going
to tell me no," she said in July. "I literally
have not left at all" since March, she said.
For a while, it looked like a Trump administration policy announced in early
July, banning foreign students from the
United States, would keep her from going
back to Texas in the fall. Rojas, who grew
up in Honduras, was studying at Trinity
University on an F-1 student visa. The administration's new plan was to allow international students to enter (or remain
in) the country only if they had in-person
classes, so Rojas was scrambling to ensure
that at least one of her classes would meet
in person. Then, in the face of intense criticism and lawsuits from top universities,
the administration reversed its position.

Courtesy of the students

lmost every college student in America has had their education, and possibly their plans for the future, disrupted by the
COVID-19 pandemic. But each student has a different story. Here
are nine of them.

Washington Monthly - September/October 2020

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