With uncertainty still surrounding what’s to come for the fall semester, one freshman is hopeful for a normal start to her college experience.
Lily Krowas, incoming freshman in biomedical engineering and pre-med, said she is looking forward to the new experiences college affords, but hopes that classes will be face-to-face.
Even as the rate of new COVID-19 infections decreases across the state of Kansas, it’s still unclear what a fall semester will look like at Kansas State. University officials have floated the idea of a hybrid semester in which some classes occur online and others resume in-person instruction, but it’s still all up in the air. The university will remain in its limited operations status at least until July 31.
When deciding what to do if in-person classes are still not an option come August, Krowas said going to community college is an option for her.
“Obviously, there’s a lot of uncertainty with everything, but it just seems a smarter idea if we were to go to just online classes and not be on campus for me to go to Johnson County Community College just to save money,” she said. “It’s a hard decision to make and we haven’t put that much thought into it just because we like to hope that we would be going to school in the fall.”
Krowas said she hopes that everything will be fine and everyone will be able to go back to school in the fall, but feels it is smarter for incoming freshmen to go to a community college if universities were to move to online learning for the remainder of 2020.
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“I think that it would be smarter to just go to a community college just to play it safe for their first semester and then figure out what to do after that if things still are really bad,” she said. “But if not, I know a lot of people have been looking forward to going out of state and kind of move away from home and have their own experiences, so I’m just kind of holding on to the hope that everything will be fine by then.”
Krowas said she felt nervous about having the memorable first year of college that everyone talks about.
“It’s something that you always think about and I’ve just really been looking forward to getting to stay in a dorm with my best friend and doing all that stuff and possibly rushing,” she said.
For many students, moving to the dorms is one of the biggest transitions, but options will look a little different this year with the Strong Community closed.
“I’m just nervous about the dorms and stuff not being able to open up and classes being online and if it does come to that, I’m not sure what plan of action the school will take,” Krowas said. “It’s just kind of nerve-wracking because I don’t really know. Going into college is already nerve-wracking as it is, so I’m just not really sure what I’m going to do.”
Whatever form classes take, Krowas said her biggest challenge will be becoming self-reliant and managing her time.
“Time management and stuff like that because I’m not really not good with that so I know that’s going to be a big change,” she said. “I feel in college it’s really easy to just not do what you need to be doing. Just making sure that I’m still on track. I’m at school for a reason, I need to be doing what I’m supposed to be doing.”
