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.
Heavenly Perez ’24:
Switching from quarantine at home to college was a very drastic change in my life. I went from seeing the New York City skyline and busy streets to being surrounded by trees and hawks. My experience at St. Joe’s thus far has been like a huge board game. I now have new rules, a new environment and new goals.
On a normal day at St. Joe’s, I go to Campion, then to class in Merion Hall, then back to Campion, and last, back to my dorm room in Lafarge Residence Hall.
I pass by many places and see many new faces. Some days I would go to the store with some friends, and some days I would stay in and watch Netflix. You can always catch me doing homework in my dorm room or in the library. I usually hang out in my suite or on the Villiger lawn area.
I use a variation of the game Monopoly to show what my everyday life is like. In this map, I show the places I visit and pass by on a daily basis, like a game piece, hopping from place to place. From being in class to quarantining, college life is so different, especially in the middle of a global pandemic.
Perez is a theatre major from Brooklyn, New York.
Heavenly Perez’s Map
