Guest post by Rachel Pekelney, 3rd year undergraduate at UC Berkeley majoring in Conservation and Resource Studies
I’m not alone in missing certain things from our pre-Covid world. I’ve been doing my best to avoid unnecessary thought about the future given its hazy shroud of uncertainty, but as a third year undergraduate, I can’t help but imagine what may happen if the fall semester is entirely or mostly online.
Like many other students, I unceremoniously returned home to live with my parents at the beginning of the shelter-in-place orders. Although I have missed many parts of on-campus classes and physically being in Berkeley, I’ve specifically missed the feeling of being surrounded by collective learning and an intellectual community. It’s a feeling I don’t think I dwelled on much before being away from it, but during this past semester’s RRR week— a time when my friends and I would normally ensconce ourselves in a corner of Doe Library—I sat alone in my room at home noticing its conspicuous absence.
Studying in Berkeley’s beautiful and abundant libraries impressed upon me a sense of collaborative, accumulated knowledge. In a subtle way, being literally surrounded by books made me feel like I was a part of an intellectual community, even if I wasn’t always with other people. I liked to sit at a table in the Bioscience and Natural Resources Library and glance over the titles around me; on one side would be an entire shelf devoted to information on whales, and on another side, funnily enough, infectious diseases. If something caught my eye, I would just pluck a book off the shelf and browse through cool diagrams or passages I didn’t fully understand.
More tangibly, I felt connected to Berkeley’s intellectual community whenever I attended in-person office hours. This spring semester’s Zoom office hours had an awkwardness to them despite the fact that we had the first half of the semester to connect with our instructors in person. Now that I’m starting a new online summer course with an unfamiliar professor, I feel more anonymous than I did in my spring Zoom classes. And while I can still attend online office hours, they don’t feel the same when I can’t appreciate the unique personalities of my professors’ campus offices. As leaders in their respective fields, Berkeley professors are bountiful, welcoming resources for information. Since I entered college unsure of what major I wanted to pursue, I made an effort in freshman year to go to office hours at least once for each of my professors and ask a few questions to see if anything sparked my interest. I was never disappointed. In my wildland fire science professor’s office, slices of trees with fire scars and ring measurements adorned the walls. The professor for my natural disasters class once pulled from his desk drawer samples of continental and oceanic crust rocks so I could feel the difference in density between the two. Works by Saidiya Hartman, Angela Davis, and James Baldwin filled crammed shelves in the office of the professor for my “Novels of Toni Morrison” class. For my two semesters of calculus, I diligently attended office hours at the Student Learning Center with clusters of other students. Though I can’t say I’m nostalgic for the problem sets themselves, I do miss the feeling of collectively working through them with my peers around me.
I was (and am) still learning new things with online classes. While I am fortunate to have a comfortable and safe home to go back to, college feels quite different when I’m sitting alone at my desk surrounded by my old Harry Potter books and high school yearbooks. Less like a shared journey, more like a solitary grind.
However, I haven’t completely lost that feeling of being in the intellectual community of Berkeley. One of the reasons I now reflect on the absence of in-person office hours is because that is how I first became involved in the Hlusko Lab as an undergraduate research assistant. I took Professor Hlusko’s Human Biological Variation class in the fall of my freshman year, and began popping into her office hours regularly to ask questions. Being around Professor Hlusko and her group of graduate and undergraduate students has provided me with a welcoming and invaluable window into both the research and teaching sides of Berkeley. I had the opportunity to join the lab group for a seminar this spring, and once the shelter-in-place orders began, an additional weekly “Lab Tea” Zoom check-in. I feel connected to this academic community, which has been especially meaningful to me in this time of physical distance from Berkeley itself. I couldn’t have anticipated any of this at the beginning of the school year, but I’m grateful that I have it now. And all of it was made possible because I simply liked going to office hours and having a face-to-face conversation with my professor.
Though Zoom office hours feel uninviting, I know we as students will adapt and make them work. I still attend them, and whether instructors use artificial Zoom backgrounds or reveal the walls of their homes, there exists a novel form of connection in our shared separateness. We are simultaneously far apart and brought closer than before through our new virtual windows into each others’ worlds. But for now, I am grateful for the time I spent physically surrounded by Berkeley’s intellectual community, in the libraries and in office hours, and I look forward to the time when I can do so again.