“It was good, but it was nothing like being on campus before–like everything was totally different.”
Cecelia Barron is a junior at Merrimack College who is part of the honors program, a member of the women’s soccer team, and has worked in both Merrimack’s campus mailroom and intramural sports program. She was a freshman in her second semester of college when students were sent home because of the pandemic.
In the interview, Barron discusses her experiences at Merrimack College throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. She reflects on her life prior to the pandemic and her early memories of hearing about the virus and discusses her return to campus for the 2020-2021 school year. She explains how the pandemic affected her as a person and as a student-athlete as well as how it affected life at Merrimack.
Excerpt
Megan Lyons: What were the classes like? Were they in person, remote, or mixed?
Cecelia Barron: In the fall I definitely had some all remote classes. I think it was about 50/50. Some of them I had hybrid and then some were just completely Zoom but then I remember when we were in the classroom it would only be like half the people will go one day and then half the other.
ML: Okay, so they split it up. So what factored into your decision to go back to campus and not stay home and do remote classes again?
CB: So we didn’t know whether or not we were actually going to have a season. So we weren’t required to come back, but I was just under the assumption that we would be playing–like I just needed to plan that way by that time, because we didn’t know our season was canceled when we had to make the decision of whether we’re living on campus or at home and I’m like an hour away so I wouldn’t have been able, obviously, to commute for like practice. I don’t even think I would have been allowed on campus if I was remote so that was the main reason that I’m that I decided to come back on campus.
Interview Details
The interview was conducted on Zoom at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts, on November 18, 2021, by Megan Lyons.
Accession Number
2021.55.1
This interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.