Abstract:

Beginning in March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted and complicated the operations of universities across the country. For the first time in history, the majority of American college students took classes online. As the pandemic carried over to a new academic year, however, many institutions began to reincorporate in-person learning and allow students back on campus. Harvard College was not one of them. In a particularly conservative move, Harvard conducted all classes online and permitted only 40% of undergraduate students to live on campus. While freshmen, juniors, and seniors were all invited back as full or partial cohorts, most sophomores spent the entire year remote. Now that all students have returned for in-person instruction, my research seeks to investigate how Harvard’s junior class is reintegrating into the social campus community. In this paper, I provide analysis of six qualitative interviews to explore what role formal and informal social structures played in reintegration, as well as whether losing a year of in-person college influenced how respondents organized their social lives when they returned to campus. Although I refrain from drawing conclusive statements, my findings tentatively reveal that a sense of “lost time” encouraged most respondents to prioritize their social lives above or equal to their academic work. Interestingly, formal social structures such as clubs and extracurriculars did not appear to promote new friendships or integration, with respondents more likely to rely on informal connections or their residential houses, and while the pandemic made several more open to socialization, it did not directly impact where and with whom they felt they most belonged.