Cal State LA students are reflecting on their college experience after spending a good portion of it behind a screen. 

In 2020 a global pandemic struck and shut down everyday life. Classes and events were canceled, school went online, and many were hospitalized or passed away due to COVID-19. 

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 1,142,141 people in the United States have passed away from the disease since January of 2020. 

The world has been moving back to in-person, rather than online. For many students who are graduating this semester or next, the college experience has just begun. 

Students such as transfer student Coko Kirton, found it hard to make connections with peers and build relationships with professors while attending college through a computer. 

Kirton is graduating in the spring and is a 2020 high school graduate whose senior year was mostly canceled. She did not get to have her school dance but got to have an in-person graduation with masks. 

She spent her first year of college online and did not manage to make any new friends. Most of her classes were asynchronous with only a few having interactions through Zoom.

According to Kirton, coming back to school after a year of being online was very strange because people did not know how to make friends or talk to each other in class anymore. 

“Everything was awkward,” she said. “Now that I’m in my last year…I’m now starting to feel like I’m getting the hang of making friends and classes and enjoying school, but it’s already about to finish. So, I feel like a freshman in my fourth year.” 

Kirton is excited to graduate but is sad that she and the friends she just made will be going their separate ways after graduation.

Kimberly Diaz, a theater major who is graduating this fall, said she did not feel like she was learning anything while taking online classes and that making friends online was really hard.  

“I felt that my whole college experience was kind of ruined because I wanted to…meet new people, make friends, learn new things in-person. So, I felt like I didn’t really have a connection with anybody while that was going on,” Diaz said. 

She said she did not really make any friends in her online classes but did when she went back to campus. She wishes she could have met people “organically” and not through a screen because you don’t know who people truly are, until you meet them in person. 

Film, television and theater major, Asanii Campbell took two years off, during the pandemic and will tentatively be graduating next school year. She said she feels like she missed her opportunity to better her education and that she did not have a very good transition into adulthood because of the pandemic. 

“Maybe if I actually experienced life on campus, I would have not just only made friends for a short period of time, I would have made long term friends,” Campbell said. 

As a “very social person,” she does not enjoy making friendships online and prefers interacting with people in person, where she can read body language. Online, people can present themselves as whoever they would like to be. 

She said listening to a professor in-person is like getting a good word from a preacher, because they are motivating and moving the crowd to understand their word. 

“There’s an importance in receiving education in person. You can kind of… understand the passion behind what they’re saying and that could transfer to the students,” Campbell added.