The COVID-19 pandemic has not only changed our world, but it has also changed people, for better and for worse. The YSU community is no stranger to those changes. Below is a compilation of staff, faculty, and students describing their challenges, triumphs, and personal reflections on this year of COVID-19.

Denise Walters Dobson, Academic Administrator for STEM, has had her difficulties with connecting and communicating with students all over. She advises and assists current students any way she can: virtual appointments and emails, scanned documents, fillable forms and even google calls which she learned during the pandemic. Along with keeping herself organized, she has also reached out to long lost extended family and old friends from the past. When she isn’t organizing, she focuses on her family and personal health and learned to slow down and enjoy the here and now.

Maureen Adams, an Academic Ops Specialist in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, had a challenging beginning. Due to COVID-19,the university underwent a major restructuring. Maureen was fortunate to keep a job, but was transferred to a new department. After a period of adjusting, Maureen became comfortable with all the new things about her position. Like many others, the worst part about this past year for her was the separation and worrying about her family, friends, coworkers and students. The pandemic has made Maureen notice how much her priorities have changed, trivial things that once were important to her don’t seem to matter anymore.

Emilie Brown’s position as Outreach and Scholarship Coordinator for the college is all about interacting with people and the community, unfortunately that's quite different this year. Ms. Brown typically sets up a dozen or more field trips per year, interacting with guests and families, hosting people on campus, going out to schools to promote STEM and all the amazing things we have to offer. Being secluded and away from her family and friends has been the worst for Ms. Brown, especially as her young nieces grow and both her sisters are expecting babies this Spring. The best thing to come out of the past year, for her, was having the opportunity to work from home, and spend time with her infant daughter. Now she can work from home 2 days a week and is blessed to get to spend more of her infancy with her than she ever thought she would.

Quan Tran, Coordinator for STEM Professional Services, sees a lot of positive in the ability to more easily offer virtual appointments to students going into the future. Most of her student appointments went virtual and are often centered around finding internships or full-time positions during COVID. As an instructor, Quan kept mostly to on-line live instruction and was happy for the opportunity to interact “in-person” with her students in that venue. Over the spring 2020 semester, Ms. Tran had a lot of events going on socially and professionally that would require a lot of travel out of the Youngstown area. But when the pandemic hit, all of her events were cancelled, so shetook the time to slow down and enjoy more quality time at home with her husband and cat. Since COVID, Ms. Tran got into fiber arts – embroidery and needle felting; She had bought some kits and received them as gifts Christmas 2019. If not for COVID, Ms. Tran would not have ever completed them.

Mike Crescimanno is a faculty member for the YSU STEM college who had to switch to on-line instruction due to the pandemic. He misses the in-person aspects such as walking around class to help students with problems, taking attendance, receiving papers, and overall, the whole in-person class experience. Oddly, he finds that virtual teaching takes a lot more time and preparation (such as collecting homework assignment through individual emails rather than at once in class) and also leads to a hoarse voice! Although he feels most students have been able to pick up a majority of the material despite all the obstacles this past year, he looks forward to the return to in-person learning and the ability to have true teaching and mentoring relationships with his students.

Ashley Duritza, faculty member in engineering technology, found the transition to remote/hybrid classes, smooth to her. She was already using Blackboard and Blackboard Collaborate for class meetings to keep everything as familiar and consistent as she could for her students. She hasn’t found the switch to hybrid classes to be too difficult, but she does, however, miss face to face instruction. Duritza misses bringing in visual aids for her students to pass around and group experiments in person. The hardest parts for her are not being able to see her students' faces, learning their names and getting to know them and the community feeling. She is looking forward to having that connection with her students again.

Julie Centofanti is a freshman who is a member of the Choose Ohio First Program. She found herself starting school during the pandemic to be different. Julie was able to manage her time, while she was learning from home. She misses aspects of being able to learn in person such as: in-person interactions, finding it easier to learn math or completing hands-on labs in classroom settings. Fortunately, her professors were well equipped to teach online. Like everyone, she found the past year to be a struggle, but she was able to get through it by spending most of her time with her dog. Julie is still excited to return to normal, and be able to go on campus, make new friends, and expand her network.

We hope all of you have had some positive and learning experiences this past year, have taken some time to reflect and recharge, and maybe learn something new or start a new hobby.

If you’re interested, YSU is collecting personal experiences of COVID for the University Archive. For more information, contact Cassie Nespor at 330 941 3788 or clnespor@ysu.edu