A Year Into Quarantine: Senior Perspective

by Niyati Gandhi ‘21

With the pandemic still going on, senior year has been especially bittersweet. Though I am glad to be graduating, I feel nostalgia for the pre-covid days where we could all gather together to celebrate. The commencement ceremony will be virtual, which is very different from the ceremony we expected when we first started at Pace. Nevertheless, I’m grateful for the chance to celebrate even though it is virtual. I was even asked to write a speech for the virtual ceremony! (I am not sure if I will get to recite it as I was selected as the alternate speaker, but feel free to watch the video I recorded at the link below.) I’m also looking forward to the time when people can gather again and make up for all the missed celebrations.

Other aspects of senior year have also been different than I expected. What used to be lunch dates with friends have turned into walks in the park with masks on. My classes are all online, either synchronous with a fixed class time or asynchronous. It is much harder to make friends in online classes, but I’ve found that social media and extracurricular activities or events can help with making connections with other students. This semester I’ve been working on my Honors thesis, which has been quite the adventure. It seemed daunting at first, but breaking it down into parts and having support from my advisor made it manageable. Now, 50 pages and one presentation later, I finally finished my thesis. It feels like a great weight off my shoulders. I am proud of the work I did and glad I chose to do research in the television industry, a topic I enjoy. If there’s one piece of advice I could give about the thesis, I would say that you should choose a topic you are interested in because you will spend a lot of time on it.

As the semester comes to an end and the weather brightens up everyone’s mood, I feel content. Though this past year didn’t go the way I expected, I still learned a lot, made connections, and had meaningful experiences. That sounds like a pretty good senior year after all!

https://youtu.be/2QEJx3LHR7I

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