Student Confused by and Slightly Afraid Of Newfound Feelings of Hope

WEST CAMPUS—After feeling ill at ease for close to a week, area student Maya Yuan ‘23 realized with a start that the unfamiliar emotions she was experiencing may be attributable to hope.

“Things have been weird lately,” said Yuan, her eyes darting restlessly around the room. “The weather is getting nicer, all my friends and relatives are getting vaccinated, I’m in the home stretch of my classes, I got an internship lined up for the summer… something’s got to give, right? No way things can be this, like, normal.”

With the Covid-19 pandemic in its waning days, there are many signs that campus life and society at large may soon pivot back to what once was before the world ground to a halt in March 2020. This has left many students feeling optimistic for the future, a foreign sentiment for over a year. Yuan, like many of her peers, says that she’ll believe it when she sees it.

“It’s like that moment thirty minutes before the end of a movie when it looks like the good guys solved the problem and destroyed the villain,” said Yuan as she suddenly jumped up and began pacing around the room. “It’s looking good, but you know that they wouldn’t put an extra thirty minutes in if nothing else was going to happen. Maybe it’s the new variants, maybe it’s anti-vaxxers, I don’t know. There just, there has to be something.”

At press time, Yuan was seen reading an email from the Cornell administration about campus returning to Code Green and proceeding to bite her fingernails nervously.