For international students, COVID-19 brings both loneliness and community
Plus, student fitness instructors on teaching to a screen
Good morning, and happy Wednesday. On this pre-pandemic date last year, Colorado Springs REI hosted a free snowshoeing clinic for up to 45 lucky individuals. (This year, socially-distanced winter recreation is popular in Colorado, notwithstanding some early-season crowds.)
Today, we explore how COVID-19 impacted international students at Colorado College and what the school has done to support them. Also, two students who work as fitness instructors at CC’s gym describe how they do their jobs virtually.
➡️ ICYMI: On Monday, our resident microbiologist Phoebe Lostroh gave her weekly forecast for El Paso County. She also explained the “surge event” potential of the U.S. Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6.
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El Paso County Public Health launched a new vaccine dashboard to provide information about accessing vaccines. Learn how to contact providers and get details on vaccine eligibility and timelines here. Also, Gov. Polis announced on Monday that Colorado aimed to vaccine 70% of people 70 and older by Feb. 28.
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Student access to the Worner Campus Center changed this semester. Now, visitors must limit their time spent in the building to 15 minutes. Masks must be worn at all times, and eating, congregating, or studying in Worner is not allowed.
Photo courtesy of Isabel Hicks ’22.
At home or far from it, international students find support amid uncertainty
✈️ ❌ The early days of the coronavirus
Last January, COVID-19 was not a present threat to the average college student in the United States. But for some Chinese international students, the coronavirus already posed a challenge as they tried to re-enter the U.S. to return to school after Winter Break.
On Jan. 31, about a week after the Chinese government implemented a strict lockdown in Wuhan to control the pandemic, the Trump administration announced the U.S. would bar entry to foreigners who had recently visited China and quarantine Americans who returned from the country. This policy made it difficult for some Chinese students to return to their U.S. universities, including several who attended Colorado College.
Marlene Arnold, Assistant Director of the International Student Scholar Services (ISSS) at CC, said that people from China make up over half of the college’s international student population.
“We had Chinese students unable to return to the U.S. in January because of the travel restrictions put in place by the U.S government,” Arnold told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. ISSS worked with students on their immigration status to help them get back into the country, she added.
But even if students did make it back to the U.S., in-person classes wouldn’t continue for long. On March 10, the CC community received an email from administration saying they were moving classes online and people had a week to move out of their dorms.
The announcement said that people who had no option but to remain on campus, including international students and people with extenuating circumstances, could request special permission to remain at CC.
Joshua Kalenga ’23, who is from Zambia, said he felt “pretty uncertain” when he received the email in mid-March.
“I didn’t know ... what it would mean for me personally, and where I would be in the coming months or when I could go home next,” Kalenga told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. “I guess shock is the word.”
Soon after the first announcement, the school sent a follow-up email about CC’s emergency fund, with instructions on how students in need could request financial assistance for their expenses.
CC helped fund a plane ticket for Filip Carnogursky ’23 to travel back home to Slovakia in March. “I was pretty thankful and glad about how accommodating they were,” Carnogursky told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project.
Some international students chose to remain on campus during the rest of spring semester and the summer. CC provided these students with housing, access to dining services, and some activities including take-home kits to inspire creativity and socially-distanced movie nights.
👩🏽⚖️⚖️ Colleges sue the Trump administration, citing new international student guidelines
As the pandemic took hold of the world, the U.S. government brought the immigration status of some international students into question. On July 6, the Trump administration released guidelines for colleges and universities to use — which included a section saying international students had to leave the country if their college moved entirely online.
After facing lawsuits from high-profile schools such as Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and opposition from hundreds of other universities, Trump rescinded his previous guidance on July 14.
The U.S. government reverted back to guidelines they announced in March for the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP), which allowed international students to take their classes online as a temporary accommodation. Starting in fall, new international students had to enroll in at least one in-person class during the semester to remain in the country.
Shiyanke Goonetilleke, the Coordinator of Global Education at CC, said the college has to be “creative” because government rules are mostly directed at students who take classes on a semester system.
“That doesn’t look the same on a block plan,” Goonetilleke told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. “Some faculty have said for the sake of international students we will accommodate that, we will provide some kind of in-person element to our online classes. ... I’ve been really impressed with our faculty who have really heard the challenges of our international students.”
Arnold said ISSS’s work during the pandemic has focused on keeping up to date with recent immigration changes and communicating with students how they’ll be impacted.
“We are responsible for keeping the college compliant, as well as helping the students maintain their immigration status,” Arnold said.
🍕🥏 Supporting international students’ social and mental well-being
In addition to assistance with immigration, CC has offered Zoom conversations, socially-distanced gatherings, and counseling opportunities to support international students during the pandemic.
Goonetilleke said this year he took on some additional responsibilities to become a support system for international students. Originally from Sri Lanka and a former international student himself, he wanted to create a community he felt was lost due to the pandemic.
In October, Goonetilleke helped organize a socially-distanced lunch and game of frisbee outside on Yampa Field as an opportunity to connect with international students living in Colorado Springs.
“We were able to sit outside on the quad ... and just talk about what’s going on for them, how’s life during COVID times,” Goonetilleke said.
Last spring, the college also hired Dr. Harry Chiang, a clinical psychologist for the Counseling Center, as a mental health resource for Chinese students. Chiang speaks Mandarin and is familiar with Chinese culture. He holds sessions on Wednesdays and Saturdays for international students who would like to talk, but said not many people have attended the sessions.
“Some weeks there are not many people, some there are,” Chiang said. “The big thing is the ISSS wants students to know that we’re available for them. We’re there to help.”
The psychologist said that on top of the stress COVID-19 added to people’s lives, international students are juggling additional feelings of loneliness, isolation, and fears of being sent back home by the government.
For Kalenga, one of the hardest parts of the coronavirus pandemic is the distance between him and his home in Zambia. Other international students have struggled with the distance as well, he said.
“Being so far away from family at an uncertain time of course has its difficulties,” Kalenga said. “I think we're all struggling with that, but we are all struggling with it together.”
Student fitness instructors teach a different kind of online learning
After carefully placing their tripod on a precarious pile of items collected from their basement, dance instructor Skylar Owens ’22 sets their phone to record and takes a step back. After giving credit to the artist who created the song they’re using, Owens begins demonstrating their original choreography, move by move, with their orange tabby cat as the only live spectator.
When Colorado College abruptly evacuated its students from campus and restricted in-person meetings starting last March, the Adam F. Press Fitness Center resolved to continue their blockly workout sessions in an accessible remote format.
At the start of Pandemic Fall, fitness center staff encouraged instructors like Owens and Kara Thomas ’21 to create instructional fitness videos for the gym’s webpage.
“Obviously, we weren’t allowed to teach on campus for the first, I think, two blocks, so Chris Starr, who oversees all of the campus recreation classes at the fitness center, encouraged us to make these videos,” Thomas told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project, adding that CC still pays fitness instructors for their online teaching.
Thomas said for the most part, fitness instructors are left to their own devices to create their videos, similar to the way in-person fitness classes were previously held.
“Generally, yeah, it’s a one-person run show in my basement,” Owens told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project.
Although the fitness center ultimately reopened its doors at limited capacity on Aug. 10, some instructors continued to release videos for students living off campus and for those who might feel uncomfortable attending in-person classes. Both instructors said the workouts were important for combating the side effects of remote work, such as screen fatigue.
“This kind of expands our reach in terms of providing access to students,” Thomas said of the remote videos.
Tailoring her virtual yoga sessions to be “restorative and rejuvenating” was a priority for Thomas, mainly because she felt students needed breaks from online Zoom classes.
For Owens, creating dance videos has become something of a “passion project.” They said though they miss face-to-face interactions with students, they hope to eventually host live Zoom meetings as a platform for their dance instruction.
“I really hope that I can curate a space that people show up to and want to show back up to,” Owens said. “So that they can, in some ways, combat this screen fatigue with community and with movement and embodiment.”
While Thomas plans to resume teaching in-person classes starting Block 5, she intends to continue creating fitness videos for remote consumption.
“I do see myself continuing to build up my ... yoga video portfolio, I guess you can call it, because that’s timeless and will show my progression of teaching over the years,” Thomas said. “But I will also continue to teach in person, because I think it is important that kids still have access to these resources.”
Owens also plans to continue to create videos in the coming months because they found the process to be “fun.”
“I believe that music and dancing is one of the best ways to enjoy a workout and to really find it delicious and amazing,” Owens said. “That’s what I want to share with people when I make these videos.”
About the CC COVID-19 Reporting Project
The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project is created by Colorado College student journalists Isabel Hicks, Esteban Candelaria, Lorea Zabaleta, and Cameron Howell in partnership with The Catalyst, Colorado College’s student newspaper. Work by Phoebe Lostroh, Associate Professor of Molecular Biology at CC and National Science Foundation Program Director in Genetic Mechanisms, Molecular and Cellular Biosciences, will appear every Monday.
The project seeks to provide frequent updates about CC and other higher education institutions during the pandemic by providing original reporting, analysis, interviews with campus leaders, and context about what state and national headlines mean for the CC community.
📬 Enter your email address to subscribe and get the newsletter in your inbox each time it comes out. You can reach us with questions, feedback, or news tips by emailing ccreportingproject@gmail.com.