By Kelley, 21, Effingham, Illinois
After leaving school and moving back home, every day seems to kind of run together. My typical Mon-Fri consists of 2 or 3 classes in the morning, doing the homework for those classes, then I ride my bike or go for a run, and wait for my mom to come home from work. If I have free time I like to play my piano and guitar, watch Community on Netflix, and I visit my boyfriend at his apartment on the weekends. My dad is an emergency room doctor and my mom is a chemotherapy nurse, so it's been especially difficult to keep my distance from them. I have actually not gone to my dad’s house in over two weeks because there have been a few cases of corona in the ER in my hometown, and my dad is pretty much convinced he will get it eventually and wants to keep me safe. My brother is in medical school up in Peoria, so it has been pretty lonely in my house and I miss having a bunch of people to talk to because I am a very social person. But, me and my mom have been trying to keep busy by playing a bunch of gin rummy, cooking new meals, making new drinks, and facetiming literally everyone in our extended family.
Right now I would say I feel kinda disappointed with life in general. I am a junior in college and recently turned 21, so I anticipated this semester to be spent going to bars, hanging out with friends, and appreciating the last few months I had with my roommates who are seniors. I also didn’t think I would be having to switch to online classes and lose all motivation the second I came home. I think the worst part was that it happened so suddenly and I didn’t anticipate not coming back to school after spring break. Right now the thing that I am most worried about is the fact that my internship might be cancelled or moved online this summer. I landed a really good position and working in a big corporate office was something that I have been looking forward to forever. It would make me really disappointed if all the interviews and preparation were for nothing, and I worry about how it will impact me getting a full time job.
I think this will have a massive impact on our generation’s future. It is going to be so scary graduating and looking for a job when the economy is down, and many places are letting people go rather than hiring more. My boyfriend is majoring in aviation and has been talking to me about how he doesn’t think the airline industry will recover for years and he is really worried about his career. It is something that is definitely on all of our minds and changes all plans we had. I just think the future is so unknown and it’s hard to try to prepare for anything right now because there’s no indicators of what everything will be like when this is all over.