For the most part, we live in a time where we aren’t wearing masks in classrooms and we can be less than six feet apart, but there are definitely still some small remnants from COVID-19 in our daily lives. It’s the little things that will impact us and our generation as a whole for the rest of our lives. Some of them are actually good and the lessons gained from our shared experiences in quarantine will serve us well, but others… Well, I hope we can learn to fix them.

First of all, we are much more flexible about when and where we work together. We are quicker to jump to Zoom to make a time that works for everyone, and there are Zoom options for a lot of opportunities, like interviews and internships, that earlier would’ve been forced in person. This is good and bad because sometimes there is a lot more to gain from meeting in person, but it allows us to be more efficient and argue less about meeting coordination.

Because we are so used to being on Zoom, either with cameras on or off, a small enough square that we are sure people aren’t looking at us, we have gotten REALLY bad at reacting properly during presentations. Not only do we give completely blank stares at presenters as if they can’t see below our eyes, but we also provide presenters with no energy or cues as to whether we understand or are enjoying their presentation. As a student presenter, this is agonizing; I cannot even imagine how professors deal with us like this on a daily basis. 

This has real-world consequences as we move into jobs with more presentations and some client-facing as well. We should be reacting even on Zoom, but when we are in person there is absolutely an expectation to be engaged in the material we are viewing. We have gotten way too used to watching media alone and not laughing when things are funny to the point that when we’re in person and someone is desperately trying to be engaging they get nothing in return. We all know how horrible it feels to try to tell a joke and have no one laugh, so why do we hang professors and guest speakers out to dry all the time?

We have lost some of the social cues in facial expressions and body language to know how to react because we got so used to only seeing people from the shoulders up or just their eyes in person. We need to work on that again. It’s great that we are learning to adapt to our changing environment and be more flexible with people, take illness more seriously and give people the time they need to recover. But we can’t lose other parts of our humanity in the process and stare blankly at people when we are not in a small group discussion. The Bucknell landscape is as much the same as before COVID as it is now, but these differences make it clear that something happened and we need to think about whether we want to keep that or not.