Occidental’s class of 2024 may be graduating together in May, but just over four years ago, they were dispersed around the world individually, celebrating what seemed to be a one to two-week extension of spring break.
Kyle Ahn (senior), from Rancho Palos Verdes, CA, remembered his high school sent the fateful email March 12, 2020 and was initially excited for the more time off.
“I had a bunch of tests coming up and I was like, ‘I don’t have to do them,’” Ahn said.
At that time, Isac Benyam-Desbel (senior) said he was attending a high school with an International Baccalaureate (IB) program, whose headquarters are in Switzerland.
“When a bunch of other IB schools around the world started shutting down, especially in Italy or in other parts of Europe, I remember there was a big push to get our version of the AP exam canceled because we were like, ‘They can’t take scores right now because half the world and all of Europe was shut down right now,’” Benyam-Desbel said.
Suddenly, COVID-19 arrived in the U.S. and patient zero just happened to be from King County, WA, where Hannah Christensen (senior) was going to high school. She said she anticipated her school to shut down because schools around the county began to do so.
“I was literally in AP Gov, sixth period, when the announcement came on,” Christensen said. “We all kind of saw it coming, but at that point, everyone was expecting to come back by mid-April.”
Come April, the break kept going. And going. The class of 2020 never returned to their high schools, at least for any in-person instruction.
Schools began canceling proms and in-person graduation ceremonies, Amanda Iglesias (senior), from Acton, MA, said.
“They said school was closed for the rest of the year — I did cry about it,” Iglesias said. “It felt really weird, it all felt really fake.”
Instead, high schools adapted to drive-by graduations and final farewells to teachers from their parents’ cars’ sunroofs.
The drive-by graduations were memorable, to say the least, but maybe not in the way Noel Lee (senior)* from Glendale, CA, would like to remember.
“It was like drive by, get diploma, drive by, walk the podium with a mask, drive by, get a photo,” Noel Lee said. “I closed my eyes and they didn’t do the retake.”
Benyam-Desbel said he enjoyed his high school graduation, though. One high school alumni’s parents owned an old-fashioned drive-in movie theater, where Benyam-Desbel and his friends watched pre-recorded videos of their class receiving their high school diplomas.
“We all parked our cars, we all crowded into my car, all screaming and yelling and stuff because there were no rules,” Benyam-Desbel said. “It was just a fun graduation, actually. And my brother graduated a few years later and that was so boring.”
Ahn said he was invited to speak at his class’ graduation, but instead of speaking to 500 of his classmates, he had to pre-record a speech in front of a cameraman and his principal.
Ahn’s graduation came amid the social reckoning after the May 25, 2020 murder of George Floyd, which not only impacted his speech to his classmates, but his outlook on his future at the time.
“I tried to make people feel like there was hope in the future because at the time, everything felt so hopeless and so apocalyptic, but I didn’t want to make people feel that way when we’re supposed to be celebrating, right?” Ahn said. “When we’re supposed to be moving on to new chapters in our lives.”
Gieselle Gatewood (senior), from Chino, CA, said that despite the strange high school send-off, her unique graduation was the least of her concerns.
“At that time, I was like, ‘Okay, my graduation probably isn’t the biggest thing’ because I had older family members, you know? We all had people who were more susceptible to COVID, so it’s like graduation, ‘whatever,’” Gatewood said. “I also was just so ready to go to college.”
Daniel Lee (senior), from La Crescenta, CA, said COVID-19 started to feel real when his mom, who runs a dry-cleaning business in Simi Valley, and his dad, who worked at a sushi shop, both lost their jobs.
“They weren’t out of business for more than a month, but they did spend a good amount of time at home and they were pretty stressed out,” Daniel Lee said.
When both returned to work, Daniel Lee said he was worried that both of his parents would catch COVID-19.
“For my mom specifically, you’re getting clothes that were being worn, so we’d be like, ‘Be careful, wear a mask,” Daniel Lee said. “It was really scary. That’s when I felt like it was really affecting the world.”
Throughout the end of high school, Ahn worked at a Mediterranean restaurant and said he was considered an essential worker. Out of four members of his family, including his parents, he became the only Ahn working, sometimes taking on a full eight-hour shift while juggling schoolwork.
“It was probably one of the most depressing times of my life because I would drive to work and there would not be a single car on the road,” Ahn said. “There would usually be a slump of traffic and that time of year, it was pretty rainy and empty streets — it was just me and my mom’s minivan.”
For many seniors from California who were interviewed, Occidental quickly became a top-choice college over a list of bigger universities and other liberal arts colleges primarily due to an attractive financial aid package and the appeal of staying in the state amid a global pandemic. That was the case for Bay Area resident Pooja Bansiya (senior) who initially wanted to attend the University of California Santa Barbara and the University of Washington.
“The pandemic made it difficult to visit schools because I wanted to see Oxy and I wanted to see what it was actually like. I eventually did come on a trip here with my dad and we saw campus by itself, but it felt so weird to do so because we were just looking literally at how it looked — it was totally empty,” Bansiya said. “I don’t think they had anybody here during that summer, so I chose Oxy on a whim.”
By July 15, 2020, President Harry Elam announced in a campus-wide email that classes would be conducted remotely and housing would only be offered to international students and those in dire situations.
Ciara Gillen (senior), who is from Newton, MA, was intent on moving to California after graduating high school and said she was excited about what college had to offer.
“I was excited to move across the country, live in a dorm with a new roommate and see what communal living was like,” Gillen said. “Oxy had such a good reputation for their food at the time like I just wanted to go to the dining hall.”
Gillen said she was not surprised about the college’s decision to go remote for at least the Fall semester.
“I think I was trying to hold that hope that we would be in person, but I felt like I knew the odds were so low,” Gillen said. “Especially with Oxy being in Los Angeles, I knew it was so bad here and so when we got the email, I wasn’t super surprised.”
Beyam Desbel said he felt hopeful when the college announced that remote instruction would only be for a semester initially.
“I thought to myself, if I’m going to stay home I’d rather just do something else, work or take a gap year,” Benyam-Desbel said.
Taking a gap year crossed other seniors’ minds including Gatewood’s, who ultimately decided to leap into college based on financial reasons. Without having to pay for her room and board, Gatewood said it was an easy decision to enroll immediately.
“It was a pretty easy decision for me to just be like, ‘Okay, one year on Zoom,’ if we had to do a second year on Zoom, maybe I would do a gap year, but it was like yes, this sucks, but I’m saving a lot of money,” Gatewood said.
The majority of the class of 2024 subsequently spent Fall 2020 in the nooks and crannies of cramped apartments or locked in their childhood bedrooms. Arelí Fernandez Orozco (senior), who is from Pasadena, CA wrestled with a preteen brother, a teenage sister and an older brother working from home during Fall 2020.
“They would get annoyed with me because I’d be in Glee Club singing and they’d be like, ‘Shut up! You’re being so annoying’ and I’d be like, ‘I’m sorry!’” Fernandez said. “My little brother definitely loved causing chaos and mayhem in the back of my Zoom recording — he would just walk by or just do silly things or just wait till I was unmuted to say some random stuff. It had me really on edge, but it made things exciting. I look back on it now, and it was nice to have people that brought some excitement, however small, to Zoom life.”
Others’ setup was quieter. Josue Corona Solis (senior) said he spent his first year at home in Portland with his mom, who also worked remotely. Corona Solis remembers August through September fondly, majorly due to the comfortable Portland weather; but he said after Halloween when colder temperatures and rainfall passed through, he barely left the house. Once, he finished all eight seasons of “Game of Thrones” in a week.
“I don’t really think about that a lot, to be honest, because there was nothing to think about,” Corona Solis said. “I was just doing class.”
Gillen said her mom would joke that Gillen attended college at “Occidental College – Newton Campus” (as in Newton, MA, her hometown).
Ahn lived in a two-bedroom apartment at the time and said his mom set up another desk in her bedroom for him to attend Zoom classes as he and his sister, who was attending Cal State Long Beach, had overlapping schedules.
“Sometimes I would have to stay up late doing homework until midnight, and she would be there like, ‘Kyle take as much time as you want, I’m gonna go to bed but you stay here,’” Ahn said. “I had a corner of the apartment that was dedicated to my workspace, and that was all just because of the generosity of my mom. She was so instrumental in making sure I had at least a semblance of a productive workspace.”
Similarly, Gatewood said her parents and her brother decorated her room and bought a bookshelf and a desk to resemble the feeling of living in a dorm room.
“I had my Zoom background, so I had specific posters that I wanted people to see in my background,” Gatewood said. “It wasn’t too bad, and I was really privileged in my situation.”
While physical dorm rooms could be mimicked, the social aspects of being in a dorm were not so easily remedied.
Iglesias said she felt disconnected from Occidental.
“I still felt like a high school student, just kind of like going through the motions. I was still in my childhood bedroom and I honestly didn’t even put in any effort to get to know anyone because it felt so awkward just to try to talk to people online,” Iglesias said. “It just felt so forced.”
Iglesias did, however, join the Dance Production Club (Dance Pro) because she danced throughout high school and wanted to continue the practice. Only this time, she was practicing in her attic.
“It felt so silly,” Iglesias said. “You didn’t perform [the showcase] live over Zoom, you had to pre-record it on your phone and send a video of yourself, so obviously I was so hyper critical and I had like 20 videos of me doing the same dance over and over again on my camera roll. But it was cute, and it was funny doing Dance Pro the next year seeing people who were in my online dance group and being like, ‘I know you.’”
Bansiya also did Dance Pro online and said it was part of her first-year initiative to join as many clubs as she could to be as active as possible. One of those clubs was the Pulse Dance Club, which she is one of the presidents of.
“If I came to campus freshman year, I don’t know if I would’ve joined Pulse e-board,” Bansiya said. “I think, for me, I was trying to be really active freshman year and that really helped push me into the things I do today.”
For others, the opposite happened. Gatewood, a lifelong volleyball player and a budding recruit for Occidental’s volleyball team, spent the first year experimenting with spending time away from the sport while still meeting with the team over Zoom.
“When everything shut down, I was so happy because volleyball had to stop. I loved the sport, but it was just so nice to take a break for those two weeks,” Gatewood said. “Then, during that year when we were online, I was able to get in touch with my body in other ways that wasn’t volleyball and I was able to build my identity outside of being an athlete and a student athlete.”
Then, there was that other part of college — class, or something similar to it.
Noel Lee said she took a sculpting class and received paper clay, tape, molding tools and knives in the mail. Benyam-Desbel took a geology lab and opened a package full of quartz and slate.
“We were depleting the art department’s funds, basically,” Noel Lee joked. “It was very fun. The professor couldn’t help us physically, so we were really trying hard to bring the sculpture up to the camera, like, ‘Am I doing this right?’ But it was nice to do hands-on activities and have my room to do all the crafts.”
Bansiya participated in Occidental’s Immersive Semester, a curricular program that started during the pandemic, which sought to connect students by keeping them together in clusters of academic courses and internship programs centered around a binding theme. The Fall 2020 semester offered “ PPE Portrait Project, Arts in Los Angeles”, “Computing IRL” and “California Environment & Conservation Corps.”
Bansiya said the program changed the trajectory of her Occidental experience.
“I met some of my really good friends through the Immersive Semester because you just had the same three classes with them every day, and so eventually everyone got tight,” Bansiya said.
Christensen was one of the Associated Students of Occidental College (ASOC) first-year class senators, which was a challenge in itself, she said, as she represented a student body she had never met in person and were all attending a school she had never really been to herself.
“That was something I really wanted to try and honestly in some way I was worried I wouldn’t have tried it otherwise in person — I would’ve just gotten too nervous around everyone,” Christensen said. “But, I was like, ‘Well this is one way I can try and make the best of it and try something I always wanted to get into.’”
Christensen said that she and the other ASOC senator were primarily focused on getting a pulse on how the class of 2024 was doing with bi-weekly check-ins rather than massive Zoom meetings because of complicated time zone limitations.
“It was definitely difficult because it’s hard to try and reach out to a student body that’s so disconnected at this point, especially because all of us were new — we didn’t know each other, we were trying to get to know one another, the school, the upperclassmen. So, I think for all of us, we were just disoriented,” Christensen said.
The check-in forms reflected this feeling, Christensen said.
“A lot of students felt like it was hard to connect and be involved because we didn’t know each other, it was hard for us to talk to each other because everyone was isolated,” Christensen said. “Mental health was also a big focus, which is understandable — there’s a lot of impact on the psyche after being isolated for so long.”
Elam sent a Spring update email November 2020 to the campus community stating that the college’s remote instruction would remain until further notice but kept the possibility of returning to in-person later in the semester open. In February 2021, Elam said the remainder of the Spring semester would also be completed online.
But by then, some first years were craving some semblance of independence and a college experience that they already moved to California with familiar faces and names from their first semester online.
Gillen moved to Glendale and lived in the Hyatt Place Glendale with about eight other students.
Gillen posted in the Occidental class of 2024 Facebook Group to gauge interest if anyone else was interested in moving to LA with her. After receiving a few responses, a parent found out that hotels around colleges were making deals with college students to let them live in a hotel room for the same cost as an apartment.
“The Hyatt reserved one of the big meeting rooms for us to have for the whole semester so we could do all our classes there together, but I think classes were just so on the back burner and, where we were in Glendale, we had such easy access to the Americana and the Galleria and were just running around all the time.”
Life at the Hyatt included cleaning service once a week and storing Trader Joe’s groceries in the hotel kitchen.
Gillen and her friends would go to Occidental to get COVID-19 tested every week and would sometimes meander into parties on off-campus houses with other students.
“Looking back, I’m so grateful to have done that because not only do I feel like it gave me the college experience more and I got to live in LA for a semester — and it was so fun — but the friends I made doing that are some of my closest friends I have at Oxy.”
Further North, Bansiya and her friends from the Immersive Semester moved to her friend’s cabin in Lake Tahoe. And yes, they went skiing every weekend.
“We barely left, like we couldn’t just go on a walk to a coffee shop. We were mostly just with ourselves, which I think now would have driven me insane, but I think back then, because we were at home so much, I think it was totally okay,” Bansiya said. “There would be days where I would go three or four days without leaving the house, but I think we were just so used to being home and being in a closed space it just felt normal.”
Christensen also moved in with her fellow senator she met in the Fall semester in Pasadena, which was fun, she said, but moving did not mean negating the COVID-19 protocols she experienced back home.
“I really tried to be diligent about that stuff, but it was a lot of again, waking up, going to my desk to do class, making food,” Christensen said. “It was a lot of very similar things, but just in a different place and on my own. I did like the being on my own part because it gave me some semblance of a transition and I’m not just under my parents’ roof.”
When their sophomore year did come around, however, the class of 2024 was thrown into the first-year experience they did not have. Fernandez said it felt like there were two first-year classes that year.
Corona Solis said meeting people in person for the first time after knowing them online was a weird experience.
“At the first time it’s like, ‘Oh, I’ve seen you so many times,’ but this big,” Corona-Solis said, squeezing his thumb and index finger together. “A lot of my teammates [on the cross country team] were a lot shorter than I thought they would be.”
Noel Lee said while she was excited to be immersed in a college setting, a lot of social interactions were anxiety-provoking.
“I’m the kind who hates ordering food at a restaurant, and now I have to be present and take care of myself, figure out where the MP is, figure out what am I going to say, figure out where my class is, figure out how to participate,” Noel Lee said. “But seeing how everyone was in the same shoes really made me feel reassured. And everyone was really willing to reach out and get to know people and how they were all saving up their social energy for a year and now expressing that, I was like, ‘Okay, I think I have that energy saved up too, and I’m ready to use it finally.’”
Daniel Lee said he was terrified to come to Occidental in person as a sophomore.
“As much as I did a lot of socializing during the online year, it was a lot of virtual, not in person. So coming back to Oxy, all these people I don’t know, I have to interact with them, make new friends, I’ve got to balance social life on top of academics on top of doing stuff that I liked — it was just like a lot,” Daniel Lee said. “The first semester, I kind of took a back seat a bit. It was a lot of just going to classes, going to my room, just because I didn’t know a lot of people, I didn’t meet a lot of people. The biggest thing for me back then was eating alone, it was like the scariest thing ever.”
Fernandez said being masked while meeting people was an extra barrier to forming relationships while already feeling overwhelmed by being at an in-person college.
“It was hard to make friends in the post-Zoom world,” Fernandez said. “I feel like were all traumatized and we didn’t know how to talk about it at the time, so we were just trying to live in the moment without being able to express our griefs about our hopes and fears — it was hard to make yourself vulnerable again and you just want to play it off like nothing really is wrong, so ready for college; but I feel like we all needed time to regain our sense of self and find joy and life again.”
Despite the challenge, Fernandez said being in-person sophomore year was a welcome change. Benyam-Desbel said his sophomore year was amazing. He arrived to LAX by himself without knowing anybody and said many generous strangers helped him, and his four bags, get to campus.
“Things just felt like they were falling into place really well, I was just happy to be here,” Benyam-Desbel said. “I was really happy to explore, everything was so new.”
Benyam-Desbel also said the fact that the majority of Norris Hall was filled with randomly grouped sophomores sharing common rooms and suite-style living helped him feel comfortable quickly.
“Everyone who lived in Norris that year was really happy to live in Norris,” Bentyam Dejbel said. “We just had such close friend groups built-in and places we could hang out.”
Benyam-Desbel said there was also a mad dash to find friend groups fast upon arriving on campus sophomore year.
“Everyone was kind of getting to try and know each other really fast and trying to quickly build these relationships because I think there was a kind of FOMO there because we didn’t get to do that for so long,” Benyam-Desbel said.
Christensen said while she was excited to be on campus as a student, she also took on the role of ASOC’s director of Academic Affairs her sophomore year, which was challenging due to the loss of institutional knowledge of not only the student body but any momentum that had been building in ASOC previously.
“No one knew anything, but also no one knew where to look,” Christensen said.
Gatewood said as a sophomore, despite feeling like she grew individually as a person and a student in her first year, she outgrew the desire to play volleyball in college.
“Before COVID, this whole time, I was a student athlete, but now I just got to experience one year of just being a student and I really enjoyed it and so coming back sophomore year having to transition back to being a student athlete was really tough,” Gatewood said.
Gatewood eventually quit volleyball her sophomore year, she said, but the extra free time gave her more space to take classes she enjoyed and appreciated being on campus.
Giving up hopeful endeavors was a feat faced by many seniors, including Iglesias, who said that she chose not to study abroad because she wanted to take advantage of being at Occidental, rather than somewhere else.
“I could have studied abroad if I wanted to, but in my head, I was like, ‘At the end of the day, I already lost a year, might as well stay on campus and just enjoy it while I’m here,’” Iglesias said.
However, the year online did not deter Christensen, Fernandez, Noel Lee and Daniel Lee from studying abroad. Christensen, who studied abroad in Tunisia and completed the UN semester in New York, said that having only completed four semesters on campus at Occidental, she sees her time off-campus as taking advantage of the college’s resources, rather than its actual campus.
“I was like, ‘Why do you want to come here? You want to come here because you want to experience everything the school has to offer you, and part of that includes access to these incredible programs,’” Christensen said. “It was one of the best decisions I made, going abroad.”
Still, reminders of lost time persist, especially for cross country and long-distance runner Gillen who said that in her junior year, she broke into the Top 10 times in Oxy history. Now in her senior year, she feels like she is just untapped potential as an athlete.
“I feel kind of frustrated now because I had this breakthrough in the Spring, but it’s like what if I had a whole other year ahead of me to keep doing this? And so now in my senior Spring, I feel this pressure within myself to be like. ‘I need to do everything in my power to reach my full potential in the next few months because I don’t have more time after this,’” Gillen said.
Now a month out from graduating as a college senior, Ahn said he would not do a single thing differently — except join Dance Pro earlier.
“I thought I did enough to get myself out there, to put myself into very foreign circles of hobbies and social circles, I thought I did enough, but even in my senior year, I was like, ‘No, I could have done more,’” Ahn said. “I realized there’s not really a level where I could say that’s enough because you could always do more.”
Unlike classes past, the seniors are leaving the college with a stronger sense of themselves, partly because that’s who they were stuck with for a full year.
Benyam-Desbel said being by himself for so long made him appreciate being with people.
“Having this traumatic experience that we went through together definitely strengthened relationships in really interesting and unique ways,” Benyam-Desbel said. “That’s all to say that I’m leaving Oxy with a lot of great friends. Since we were isolated for so long, it just made me appreciate all these things so much more. I remember walking down York in the three-hour break between classes and just thinking, ‘What a cool thing to be able to do.’”
Fernandez said while she wishes she had more opportunities to get to know her class, she said experiencing college in this way taught her to make do with what she has.
“Looking back on [the online year], it showed us things that we needed to slow down and take things day by day and really appreciate the people in our lives,” Fernandez said. “I think it made me grateful for what I have.”
Gatewood said that the last four years have taught her that college comes in all shapes and timeframes. Normalizing that, she said, has deconstructed the mainstream idea that college must be a straight four-year attendance at one institution.
“PSA to everyone to stay in the moment and be grateful for the time we have here,” Gatewood said. “I’m really grateful for the time I had here.”
Noel Lee said she is proud of her college experience.
“I had a list of things I wanted to do during college, which was studying abroad and all that stuff, and I did it, and I was really proud,” Noel Lee said. “[The online year] was a rough year. It made me more resilient to new, chaotic circumstances and it helped me find resources, find a way to resolve conflict and acknowledge my weakness and get help and make things better.”
The class of 2024 is ready to graduate, to say the least. This time, without the cars.
Contact Mia Anzalone at anzalonem@oxy.edu
*Noel Lee is an illustrator for The Occidental.
