Being Away From the Carleton Community You Belong To
This current Carleton sophomore reflects on her experience at home, apart from all her friends at school. She addresses how it has been difficult to stay in touch with newer friends and continue relatively new relationships online if the foundation was just developing sophomore year.
This current senior, although still living in Northfield, has had to accept that spring term was not what she wanted or expected it to be. Even though she is still near campus, she is removed from what would have been if students were still at Carleton. She does touch on her relationships with her housemates, her immediate Carleton community, but she still feels separated from the people she was "supposed" to be with and the things she was "supposed" to do if it was the senior spring term she expected.
This first year explains how being removed from the "Carleton bubble" has resulted in her and her friends reverting back to their life before Carleton. As they did not have a full year together, many first years are feeling conflicted, in between two worlds.
This image is a collage that a Carleton sophomore designed for her room, sitting right above her desk, to make Carleton seem less distant. It consists of pictures of her favorite study spaces on campus, making her feel like she is still at school and that she is not forced to do work alone. It has helped her feel like she is still connected with her community at school by invisioning herself on campus!
This Carleton student reflects on the social aspect that she took for granted at school. Realizing that she had such a broad network at school has made her appreciate Carleton and campus life more than ever. Being home, she stays in touch most frequently with the swim team, grateful for such a large built in support group, but misses out on the smaller day to day interactions with people she is not as close with but still considers her friends. Overall, she explains how it is hard to stay in touch with everyone because there is a layer of intimacy over Zoom or FaceTime calls.
This Carleton alum graduated after winter term 2020 when she found out Carleton most likely would not be back on campus in the spring. Being apart from her community of four years, she is able to appreciate relationships and reflect on what she learned. She explains the solidarity within the senior class toward the end of winter term, spending the most time together that they possibly could, realizing it might be their last few days together. She is grateful for the time she took out of studying to be with her friends, but she wishes she would not have waited for spring term to really connect with her friends, but rather live in the moment and enjoy each other.
These items collected, show the work accomplished by the Carleton community to establish some semblance of a Carleton for those students who did not live on campus. The Minecraft server was created by Lucas Demetriades at the end of March 2020.
Lucas agreed to be interviewed about his experiences running and starting up the server and he describes the many difficulties and successes the server has experienced. Additionally, he describes the sense of community the server has created in the absence of many students living on campus. The server has brought the Carleton community together creating a space in which people can share their love of the campus.
Carleton continued to hold many departmental and center programs during the pandemic. These two examples of events are just a small representation of the events that took place and the people who participated. Events such as these helped members of the Carleton community connect together and still celebrate events and have interesting discussions that were not limited by distance. Some events that normally form a sense of community were cancelled for the term and could not occur because of the distance.