‘I’m never gonna be able to get that time back’
Class of 2021 reflects on a year of losses and altered plans
Before the pandemic hit the U.S., Savannah Martinez was seeing some of her friends for the last time without even knowing it.
She was a junior at Boston University with plans to go to medical school after college. When classes moved online near the end of her junior year, she moved back home to Chicago. Though she went back to Boston in her senior year for a couple of in-person labs, her college experience never went back to what it was.
“A year full of disappointment is the only way (I) can describe it,” said Martinez.
Few things are as bittersweet as graduating from college and saying goodbye to the life you have built with the people around you for four years. The Class of 2020 was forced to pack up and move home in the midst of their senior year as their college experience came to an abrupt, anticlimactic end. There was no sense of closure, and while the Class of 2021 hoped they would not share a similar fate, they were disillusioned by the trajectory of their last year-and-a-half of college.
“My time with my friends was so drastically cut short,” Martinez said. “Thinking about that now, that’s something that’s still so disappointing ’cause I’m never gonna be able to get that time back.”
A severed social life and a college experience cut short are common among both the 2020 and 2021 classes, but the challenges they faced and are still facing do not end there.
Graduating into a pandemic and entering the world as it is shutting down and being simultaneously pressured to be successful while dealing with personal and global chaos has forced many young adults to make quick decisions. It has allowed others to slow down and reevaluate the path they were on.
Martinez had felt as if she had more time, “but being sent home kind of put me in that mentality — you know my parents are asking, they’re like, ‘Oh, what are you gonna do when you graduate?’ So I feel like I had to start thinking about what comes next much earlier than usual because I had the added pressure of my family’s right there.”
Senior year was supposed to be a time of figuring things out. It was supposed to be a year of lasts — last football games, last parties, last time living with your best friends, walking across the stage to receive a diploma while friends and family cheer.
Instead, many young people had these “lasts” without even knowing it. Seemingly overnight, everything changed, and they were expected to handle the flux of a turbulent world and virus while also navigating the next phase of their lives, the one they had been preparing for for as long as they could remember.
“I feel like I missed a big chunk, and I’m not ready to work yet,” said Sarah Jeng, a recent graduate of the University of Michigan who has moved to Chicago to work at an investment research firm.
Jeng was looking forward to many things her senior year, including celebrations with student organizations and the prelaw fraternity she was in since sophomore year.
“Usually for seniors every year, it’d just be super special because it’d be your last event,” she said. “It just kind of sucks that we missed out on a lot of that stuff.”
‘Mentally, I was checked out’
For Martinez, trying to balance a rigorous course load without the relief of a social life really took a toll on her mental health.
“I was just miserable,” she said. She’s not alone. A study found that more than 50% of college students close to graduating faced increased depression, anxiety and loneliness during the pandemic.
The coronavirus and its omnipresent variants are not the only thing plaguing the world. According to Dr. Nidhi Trivedi, a Chicago psychologist who specializes in trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety, “There’s a lot of grief in the air.”
Focusing on school from home was not a desirable option for Vincent Oganwu, a recent graduate of Loyola University. He also worried about getting his parents sick if he unknowingly contracted COVID-19, so he chose to stay in his apartment during the past school year.
“I was kind of isolated for a pretty long time,” he said.
The mental toll that the pandemic has taken on college students is not easily dissipated now that they have graduated and pandemic restrictions are easing.
When dealing with a stressful event, such as going through a pandemic, trying to keep oneself and loved ones safe, dealing with losses and trying to succeed academically and professionally, people often operate in survival mode. As a result, they might not start dealing with it until much later, according to Trivedi.
“I think right now some of the individuals are probably getting the space to process their grief,” she said. “Healing has now started for some people.”
For Oganwu, “the hardest thing was staying confident and staying motivated” because the pandemic added much uncertainty and stress to a very formative time.
“I feel like for all students, and especially at the college level or the graduating level, it just created so many new pressures in terms of what to do right after college, having a job lined up right away, knowing if you want to stay in the same city or move, whether you want to go to grad school right away or not,” he said.
He struggled to deal with the many rejections he was receiving from companies and found relief in the fact that many of his peers shared a similar experience.
Go to grad school or find a job?
For many recent college graduates, plans of going to graduate school have changed, some temporarily and some permanently. Along with feeling burned out from school, they face added financial pressures because of the coronavirus. Many frantically looked for jobs once they graduated.
“I just got so burnt out,” Martinez said. “My social life was part of the stress relief for me, and having that taken away from me so abruptly (meant) my whole life was kind of schoolwork, schoolwork, schoolwork, and I just got so unbelievably burnt out that I couldn’t even fathom the thought of going to grad school right away.”
With a laugh, Martinez added that “I have decided that I will not be going to med school. I just can’t process going to school for four years again.”
Atop the burnout, a complicated job market and decline in employment opportunities hasn’t helped. After more than a year of remote learning, the idea of working full time from a computer screen does not appeal to some.
“Companies were going on hiring freezes, or completely shutting down all their applications that were even processed before the pandemic,” Oganwu said. “I found my ability to network a lot more constrained.”
Students are rethinking plans to go to graduate school, putting off moves and opting to work for a few years to gain experience before returning. Additionally, recent college graduates may be competing with the Class of 2020 for entry-level jobs.
Jeng changed her mind about going to law school as a result of the pandemic. She was studying for the LSAT and tests kept getting canceled, so she began to rethink her path.
“I didn’t really know what was going to happen,” she said. “I didn’t really know if I wanted to go to school again, (so I figured) I might as well get a job.
“And it worked out. I got a job.” Same with Anooskha Gupta, another University of Michigan graduate who says that while the pandemic has been hard, it led her to a community-organizing job in Chicago she loves and that has given her the opportunity to live in a new city.
She does worry, however, that the looming delta variant will affect her job because her work involves in-person organizing and community bonding.
Martinez shared a similar sentiment.
“It’s frustrating thinking that we might go back into another lockdown ’cause I feel like, you know, I’m wasting my early 20s away when I should be out having fun,” she said. “So I think that also still has a little bit of a negative impact.”
Finding ways to thrive despite it all
And yet 2021 college graduates are finding ways to redefine their notions of success and reshape their trajectories in a way that makes sense to them.
Martinez is working in a research lab at Northwestern, doing data for cancer clinical trials. She is unsure whether she still plans to go to medical school and hopes to move out once she feels financially ready. But for now she and her friends are saving up and staying put.
“I think the pandemic kind of sent my future plan into shambles, and when it kind of crumbled I realized it wasn’t what I wanted,” Martinez said. “But at the same time I’m like, ‘You know what? I have time to figure it out. I’m 22.’ ”
While in lockdown, Vincent worried about his ability to network, which was made complicated in an all-online environment. Still, he was able to land a consulting job and hopes to be at the office full time by September.
Vincent plans to work for three to five years before going back to pursue his MBA, a decision that was made clearer by the events of the last year-and-a-half.
And job prospects are on the rise from where they were in 2020 — job postings on Indeed have surpassed levels of February 2020.
The 2020 and 2021 classes have missed out on experiences and have lost time they will not get back. But after a year of losses and endings, these young adults are forging their own intentional, creative new beginnings.
“It’s a start, which is all I can ask for,” Martinez said. “It feels like a start in the right direction.”