We asked first-year students at St. Joe’s, who have never attended a pre-pandemic campus, and only know it as a place of masks and brown paper dinner bags and tents and often empty common spaces, to capture the campus from their perspective.
Our ask is based on Bloomberg CityLab’s Coronavirus Map Project, which was published in June and features maps that people all over the world created to document their city, neighborhood or home spaces as impacted by the pandemic.
Of the more than two dozen maps we received, we find first-year students grappling, as they do every year, with trying to get to know their new home. We see sunrises and study nooks and running paths. We see exhilaration and loneliness, desires for connections and the relief of solitude. We see students coming to terms with a semester on Hawk Hill like no other, but still finding their way.
If you’d like to contribute a map to our series, please contact Giana Longo ’22, Features Editor, at [email protected] for submission guidelines.
Alec Mettin ’24:
My map shows the great confines and boundaries of my life at St. Joe’s. My dorm room and Campion Dining Hall are marked with the largest circles because I find myself there most often. The bathroom provides coveted privacy, but I spend limited time there, so its circle is the smallest. And although I appreciate leaving my room each day and seeing my classmates in person, classrooms are monotonous and rigid: wipe desk, sit down, leave. Campion and the Villiger fifth floor lounge are exciting areas for socialization, so I gave them color.
Despite finding home here, I feel like a stranger in some of the larger areas of campus. That is why I stick to my routine. I walk the same routes to class or to Campion every day, see the same people and recognize faces. It lessens my feelings of being displaced. I run on the same path to save myself from getting lost in uncertain surroundings.
I excluded the areas of campus that fall outside of what I call my new home, the places which I only observe as an outsider. An “X” marks places that I consider “off limits:” other people’s rooms, the Ellen Ryan Field and McShain Hall. In an age of social-distancing and limited social circles, entering into these places feels almost criminal. The bold question marks signify areas yet to be explored. With time, I expect to clarify the blurred peripheral lines and expand my boundaries as I find comfort at the university and the masks come off.
Mettin is an international relations major from Doylestown, Pennsylvania.
Alec Mettin’s Map
