“I’ve been thinking about it lately
Does it ever drive you crazy,
Just how fast the night changes?”
Today is Friday, June 12th. Exactly three months ago, the entire Wellesley College community received an email from our President, Dr. Paula Johnson, officially announcing Wellesley’s decision to quickly evacuate our campus and move to remote online learning until further notice.
Thursday, March 12th is a day I will never forget—not only because of this announcement and the countless consequences it would have for Wellesley as a community and Wellesley students’ lives, but specifically because of the switch it immediately set off on campus. At 11:46 AM, the email hit our inboxes. By noon, most of us had already read it or at least heard the news. I want to share with you a timeline of what the rest of that day looked like for me.
11:46 AM: President Johnson’s announcement hits my inbox.
11:53 AM: I first read the email, stunned. Because peer institutions of ours and most colleges in the Greater Boston area had already announced their campus closures, I had been waiting for Wellesley to follow suit and do the same. But because we’re a relatively small school and we still had zero confirmed cases of COVID-19 on our campus, I guess I still had some hope that we wouldn’t close. At the very least, I didn’t think we would be closed for the rest of the semester—but alas.
~12:00 PM: I call my mom and tell her the news. We make a plan to buy my flight home to Florida for Tuesday morning, the last day most students were allowed to stay on campus. I figured I would need the maximum amount of time to pack up all of my things, figure out storage, and say goodbye to everyone. (Because of rumors that the Boston airport was going to shut down on Monday morning, I ended up changing this flight to Sunday night, giving me even less time than we thought.)
2-5:00 PM: My close friends and I go to Walmart to get storage boxes and bins to start packing our stuff. We realize that this is the last time for a long time that we’re going to be able to make random drives together like this. I cry in the Walmart parking lot.
9:18 PM: One of my best friends texts me that she has the green light to bring in just a few people to watch her perform in a play that she had been rehearsing all semester. The performance got cancelled after the announcement, but since they worked so hard on it, they were determined to secretly put the show on anyway. We run at full speed across campus to Alumnae Hall to make it in time for the show.
10:16 PM: An email gets sent to the entire student body with the College Government Election Results. I find out that I just won the election for College Government President. I call my mom at the intermission of the play. We cry on the phone together.
11:44 PM: My best friends and I go to, hands down, the most fun Pub Night that I’ve ever attended in my three years at Wellesley. Seniors are all dressed in red, toasting to each other, to Wellesley, and to life. I watch the students I’ve been following in the footsteps of for three years saying goodbye to their four years in just one night. Knowing that we shouldn’t, we all hug anyway, and everyone spends the rest of the night taking in all of the bittersweet energy that the last twelve hours has concocted. That was the last day I saw many of my friends.
That Thursday, a rush of mixed emotions swept through our 500-acre shared home, and the events to follow over the next four days will forever be cemented as some of my favorite memories of my entire Wellesley experience. Students banded together in hours to plan and organize makeshift iterations of our biggest Wellesley traditions that we would be missing with the dismissal of our on-campus Spring semester, including hoop rolling for the seniors, Marathon Monday parties, a Last Day of Classes Darty on the Academic Quad, and a tear-jerking faux-mencement (graduation) ceremony. Our goodbye to Wellesley, especially for the seniors, was so action-packed that several major news outlets (The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The New York Times, etc) reported on it the following week. I still can’t accurately put into words everything that went on on our campus that weekend, but I remember how it all felt. It felt like the world as we knew it was ending all within one day. Everything changed on that Thursday night. It was such a heartwarming reminder of how much of a community and family Wellesley is, no matter where we are in the world.
The opening remarks of President Johnson’s March 12th announcement.
The closing remarks of President Johnson’s March 12th announcement.
Until the next time we can touch Wellesley’s campus safely and together,
Tatiana ’21