2 Campuses, Week 1: Zoom vs. Zip

For Jacob Payne, each day this week has been defined by a thrice-daily trek across Grove Street to get a meal to bring back to eat in his Yale dorm room. So far, there are only two other students living on his floor. It’s silent when he leaves his room, walks down the hall, down the stairs. His footsteps echo.

Meanwhile, Jess Guerrucci has been living the busy student life, albeit with some adjustments, down the road at Southern Connecticut State University, working and eating and taking classes alongside her peers.

Guerrucci sits, masked, with her classmate Sam Tapper on swivel chairs inside the home base for the student-run weekly Southern News. Guerrucci is editor-in-chief and Tapper is the managing editor. They’ve just finished training new staff members in using Adobe InDesign to arrange the paper’s layout. Guerrucci herself has written an opinion piece this week, positioned at the top of the page with the headline: ​“Student behavior will be catalyst for semester.”

Guerrucci and Payne are both college seniors attending school in New Haven. Their first weeks of classes have looked starkly different so far.

Guerrucci, an SCSU student, commutes from Hamden for a hybrid semester of both in-person and online classes and extracurriculars. Payne, a Yale student from Arizona, lives on campus, but most of his life — at least so far for the first two weeks of mandated university-wide quarantine — takes place on Zoom.

Their experiences are, in part, the product of their respective universities’ approaches to running a college campus while the Covid-19 pandemic ensues.

Across the country, universities have been facing outbreaks of Covid-19 on campus, in part due to college parties. Some, like SUNY Oneonta, sent students home within two weeks of opening. Colleges in the New Haven area have taken a variety of approaches to curbing Covid-19 as they reopen campus life for the semester.

At privately-run Yale, with its large concentration of undergrads from outside Connectricut, every student currently living on campus is required to quarantine for two weeks, regardless of what state they’re from. This protocol means that they can’t leave their respective dormitory complexes except for emergencies and Covid tests for the quarantine period. First-years, juniors, and seniors are allowed to live on campus for the fall; 1,900 have chosen to live in the dorms. While some spaces will be open for regulated communal use, almost all classes and most extracurriculars are held online.

Nearly every class is online. (Specific numbers were not available.)

Meanwhile, at state-run Southern, only students arriving from states with high Covid infection rates are required to quarantine for two weeks, as mandated by the state. The dorms are open at 60 percent of their normal capacity, accommodating 1,500 on-campus students. Eight percent of classes are fully in-person, utilizing both indoor and outdoor spaces. An additional 20 percent of classes will be taught in a hybrid or ​“hyflex” online/in-person format.

All Southern students coming to campus are required to get a negative Covid test result within 14 days prior to arriving on campus. After that initial test, each week, 5 to 10 percent of the student body is randomly selected for a Covid test. As of Aug. 21, two students tested positive for Covid.

Yale students are encouraged to get a Covid test before departing from their hometowns. They receive another test upon arriving at campus, and from then on throughout the semester, they are required to get tested twice a week. Between Aug. 27 and Sept. 3, seven students have tested positive for coronavirus.

Out & About At SCSU

At Southern on Thursday, students sat at newly-placed picnic tables outside the library and crossed paths walking from building to building. Nearly everyone wore masks. Around noon, staff handed out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to passersby. Jazz floated through the air as a group of musicians practiced outside along a sparsely-populated path.

Due to Covid, campus buildings are meant to be closed to the public (as opposed to students), except for appointments.

Dozens of students were inside the sprawling student center Thursday around 1 p.m. Clusters of students ate at the cafe. In a separate lounge area, a handful of masked students sat on chairs, far apart from each other. Another worked inside the computer lab. Two students walked into the gym area to work out. While the building was technically closed to the public, it was not difficult for an outsider to walk in.

Signage is posted throughout indoor spaces informing students of capacity limits and reminding them to keep their distance from one another. Inside their dorms, students are allowed one guest per room.

“On campus, we are emphasizing that mask-wearing and social distancing is a shared responsibility for the good of the community. All of our signage and related awareness message emphasize that ​‘we’re all in this together,’” wrote the university spokesperson Patrick Dilger. ​“Various levels of enforcement are in place if masks are not worn in class or public areas, or if parties or large gatherings are hosted on or off-campus. Depending on the circumstances and findings, the penalties may include suspension or expulsion from the university.”

Guerrucci spends most of her time in the newsroom — the home base for the campus Southern News. On Thursday afternoon, she and a couple of other student journalists sat by the newsroom’s desktops, brainstorming ideas for stories to cover this week. There’s a new police K9 dog on campus, one reporter suggested; the story would be a follow-up to a feature from last semester.

The newsroom has gray walls, gray metal cabinets, and beige tables, but Guerrucci and her colleagues have made the space their own. A line of books — featuring a how-to guide for using Adobe Photoshop, Michael Connelly’s Crime Beat, a thesaurus — sits on a shelf along the back wall. On a large whiteboard, the newspaper crew maps out stories for each section of the paper with color-coded markers. A purple cutout owl, representing Southern’s mascot, decorates a bulletin board.

“That’s where I basically live,” Guerrucci said of the newsroom. Her fellow editors and reporters are her community.

Guerrucci’s days are busy. ​“I like being ​‘go, go, go,’” she said. She’s the editor-in-chief of the Southern News and Crescent Magazine, and the president of the campus chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists. In the evenings, she goes home to work at a remote internship for the small restaurant marketing and tech firm GoNation.

Some activities remain online, like they were at the end of last semester. Recently, the college held a virtual student involvement fair, providing students with a list of video conference links to simulate extracurricular groups’ ​“tables.” As a leader of multiple student groups, Guerrucci spent the fair waiting for people to unexpectedly show up in her conference rooms. ​“You would just sit there waiting for people to pop in and you’re just like ​‘hello!’” she said.

But many of her activities are in person. Two of her classes — sports reporting and her journalism capstone seminar — are held in person, in the same large classroom. The room is capped at 23 people, spaced six feet apart.

When Guerrucci arrives at class, she wipes down her desk before sitting down. It’s difficult to communicate in the classroom from so far apart, especially with masks on, she said. ​“I’m sitting in the back and I say to my friend, ​‘I can’t hear what he’s saying’ — and she says something back, and I’m like, ​‘What?’”

Still, she said she’s glad that some classes are in person. ​“I think the in-person teaching is so much better, so I’m just glad to be back in person in whatever capacity that we are,” she said.

Most students are being careful, according to Guerrucci. She said she’s heard of one party in a dormitory, which she assumes got broken up pretty quickly. She said she feels safe being on campus, she said; she just hopes college can remain somewhat in-person this semester.

In her op-ed this week, she urged her peers to adhere to social distancing regulations: ​“Social distancing, masks and online classes are not, and never will be the dream college experience,” she wrote, ​“but for now it will have to do if we ever want to get back to what it used to be.”

Yale Quarantine

On a typical afternoon for the past two weeks, Yale’s central yard, Cross Campus, has been dotted — sometimes congested — with visitors and students living off campus. But the rest of campus has been quiet.

At 4 p.m. on Thursday, classrooms were shuttered. Wall Street and Hillhouse Avenue were devoid of the usual rush of students bustling from class to class. In the Timothy Dwight college courtyard, a volleyball net was scarcely visible from outside the gate; the dorms are locked to the public. Inside a Wall Street gate to Berkeley College, a lone student jump-roped for exercise.

Payne’s roommate from Ohio hasn’t moved in yet; since Ohio isn’t on Connecticut’s quarantine list, the roommate has the option of moving in two weeks after online classes began without a 14-day quarantine.

So Payne’s suite is quiet, and for now, he has the bathroom to himself. He’s been slowly unpacking. A hand sanitizer dispenser sits beside the lamp on his desk.

For every meal, Payne heads to the dining hall, where he chooses between vegan and non-vegan meal options and receives his lunch or dinner in a white paper bag. (“I’ve been collecting them — paper bags, everywhere,” he said.) Thursday lunch was chicken tenders. Within his dorm, ​“we have a lot more freedom than I thought we would,” he said. ​“People are sitting close to each other eating.” Still, he brings his bag of food back to his Yale dorm room, where he eats, maybe while doing a little homework for his majors in Architecture and Environmental Studies.

“The quarantine will be a challenge,” wrote Dean Marvin Chun in an Aug. 20 email to undergraduates on campus. ​“For those 14 days, you will be able to leave only for medical reasons or emergencies. Going for a run, taking a look around, picking up a few things in town — these will all have to wait. Even though the state makes some arrival quarantine allowances for the general public, those do not apply to Yale College’s residential community because of the terms set by the city and the state that enable the university to open. You must fully grasp that you will need to remain in the same residence for 14 days.”

Quarantine will end, soon. Students will be able to leave the bounds of their dorms, with masks on, staying six feet apart from everyone except for those in their suites. They’ll be able to study in libraries, at a reduced capacity, where they’ll swipe their IDs to gain access — and to automatically log the library as a location they’ve visited for contact tracing purposes, according to the library’s website.

Students will be able to gather in courtyards in groups of fewer than 11. They’ll have the option of having people over; each suite can host up to one masked guest per resident at a time, and each person can have one maskless guest at a time in their single room. Students will continue to get tested twice a week.

Almost all classes will remain online, but Payne has a rare studio class that will eventually meet in person inside the School of Architecture. He also hopes he’ll soon be able to restart his student job as a design aide helping out with machinery at the campus Center for Engineering Innovation and Design.

For now, though, Payne’s world is mostly inside of his dorm room. He searches through old emails for the Zoom links to class. Not every class is synchronous; he watched his Wednesday ​“Economics of Natural Resources” lecture on Thursday morning. He works out on the hardwood floors of his suite. (“It went about as well as you think it might,” he wrote in an email.) He attends senior society meetings from his computer screen.

He leaves his suite briefly to obtain meals and, on Tuesdays and Fridays, a scheduled Covid test from Silliman College diagonally across the street. Sometimes, he’ll run into friends along the way and they’ll chat face-to-face for a moment.

This story was produced with financial support from Solutions Journalism Network.