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.
Caroline Dollymore ’24:
My current existence hasn’t been too exciting. It seems as though it’s: get up, go to practice, eat, go to class, eat, then sleep. It’s very boring, even for me, and possibly a bit lonely. With my map, I wanted to add more detail and emphasis on the places I find joy in the most. These are the places where I feel comfortable and serene, well, for the most part.
The one place where I find myself at ease and feels “safe” for me is my dorm room. Sure, my four walls, a bed and desk may not seem like a lot or something to get all emotional over, but it’s been a place where I can let go and be myself. I get to listen to my favorite music, dance around and sing my heart out (but not too loud of course). It’s the place where I can bundle myself up in my comforter and inhale the fragrant smell of Gain Laundry Detergent, imagining I’m at home in my own bed. It’s the place where I can eat as many peanut butter filled pretzels as my stomach can bear. It’s my safe space. It’s my home.
Every other location falls lower on the totem pole for which I enjoy the most. The only other place that’s completely bearable is the Schuylkill River. The glistening water that looks silky smooth always seems to greet me in the early hours of the morning when I arrive for practice. The river never seems to let me down.
Although my day-to-day life at St. Joe’s may seem uneventful and boring to me and to most, it’s nice to have a sense of normalcy. I think what this project has shown me is to find the little things in a new environment to find joy in, because those little things make a big difference. My hope for the future is to make some of my destinations more positive and memorable, rather than some empty and meaningless vessel.
Dollymore is a criminal justice and sociology major from Maryland.
