© UC Berkeley photo by Keegan Houser
Challenge and crisis have shaped the lives of today's college students. Where do they go from here?
Students by the hundreds were streaming through Sather Gate on a brilliant morning last week at UC Berkeley, en route to class, or the library, or the familiar comforts of the Free Speech Café. It was such a pleasant scene, so familiar, and yet for Brianna Rivera, a senior in English, it was skewing a little strange.
She was walking to her first class of the semester, English 165, which will look at the classic 19th century novel Jane Eyre through the lens of Black women writers. A promising class, for sure, and yet she was struck—shocked, actually—by the masses of humanity.
“That’s a lot for me, after having been in isolation for 18 months,” said Rivera, president of the Senior Class Council. “You want to get back into the swing of things, but there’s something kind of holding you back. It’s like, you’re having to reconcile these three people—the person you were before the pandemic, the person that you were during the lockdown, and the person that you’re becoming now.
READ FULL ARTICLE by EDWARD LEMPINEN | SEPTEMBER 9, 2021
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