A student’s perspective on the shifts of the pandemic

MANRRS Officer Jeremiah Pouncy , in his MANRRS t-shirt, is all smiles about the recent Collegiate Farm Bureau and MANRRS Full Body Meeting, the first in-person meeting of the two groups since March 2020.

Earlier this month marked the second anniversary of the day the world seemingly turned on its head. It has been two whole years since the onset of the pandemic, and consequently, the shutting down of school buildings and physical meetings. In practice, this meant that student organizations within the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences were no longer able to host in-person events, and students had to engage from behind phone, computer, and tablet screens. For the past couple of years, there have primarily been virtual meetings, and just when we thought things would return back to normal, new variants surfaced and cases surged. The thought of ever having the normalcy experienced in February 2020 seemed less and less likely.

Fortunately, the severity of the pandemic has been shifting, and recently, the MANRRS and Collegiate Farm Bureau organizations hosted their first fully in-person Full Body Meeting since March of 2020. Students within the organizations came to the meeting to receive updates, network with their peers, and learn how to leverage effective communication in a professional setting. This meeting allowed for the members to meet each other and see faces, instead of engaging with the white-lettered names within the rectangles of a virtual Zoom meeting.

As masks mandates start to be lifted and people are more comfortably adapting to in-person programming, other organizations are also hosting in-person meetings with similar impacts. For some students, there is still a sense of worry. We have been optimistic in the past, and then new findings and data are released about the virus that have sent us right back to virtual programming.  Other students are simply embracing this newfound opportunity to truly engage with their peers through physical meeting spaces. Regardless, for now, there does seem to be a light at the end of this two-year long tunnel, and for that, students are grateful.