From watching sunrises and sunsets in the balcony outside the 7th floor studio space after hours of studio work to sitting in front of my monitors for long hours every day.
…
From plotting our drawings, praying that the printer was not running out of a certain color ink to dragging and resizing our drawings onto the Miro boards.
…
From walking to Café Strada for a short break with a cup of coffee to stepping into your kitchen and making your own in between classes (or even during the class?).
…
From leaving Wurster Hall running 7 flights of stairs just because it took a decade for the elevator to reach our floor, very often fully loaded after its visit to the 9th floor to clicking “Leave Meeting” on Zoom.
…
These 2 years of graduate studies as a M.Arch student had been in many ways different from anyone could have anticipated. With the shelter-in-place policies effective since March 2020, the change from inperson class to “Zoom University”, and the shift from physical modelling to digital representation in the studio context, our life had undoubtedly changed under the global pandemic. Looking back, it had been an undeniably challenging year for all of us especially with the restrictions on air-travelling back home, the desperate moments when we heard our family and friends getting sick, the stress we bore from constantly working in front of our desks and the lack of in-person interactions that had once been of utmost importance in the studio.
Yet, while I miss how studio life used to be before the COVID-19 hit us, I am grateful for the support I received from my beloved family and friends thousands miles away, my fellow classmates and the Architectural Department. With the establishment of the Virtual Bauer Wurster Hall, the limited in-person classes going on in the campus and the plans for in-person instructions coming in the Fall semester, I am thrilled to see how life is slowly changing again in an encouraging way. Though things yet cannot go back to “normal” that we used to experience, I remain hopeful that there will always be a rainbow after the rainstorm. Like everyone else, I cannot wait for the day to come when we can go back to Wurster Hall as an alumni to greet our friends and professors in the studio and hang out with them without a mask or 6-feet social distance.
Congratulations, Class of 2021! We have made it through the crests and troughs. I sincerely wish everyone all the best and may our paths cross again in the future. Take care, my folks and go bears!