Dear students and faculty members,

Commencement is once again on the horizon. It’s a complicated milestone in the paradoxical world the pandemic has created. Despite stretches in the past academic year where days felt like weeks and weeks felt like months, it seems like I was just working on a message to the Class of 2020, lamenting that we would not be holding an in-person celebration. Time is both marching on while, impossibly, standing still. The New York Times put a name to this sensation, languishing, defined in a recent article as “a sense of stagnation and emptiness” that “feels as if you’re muddling through your days.” I think we all experience this to some degree, along with feelings of burnout, stress, or anxiety that have intensified throughout the pandemic.

While I am glad that the Class of 2021 will have their Commencement ceremony in person this month, it is necessarily a COVID-adapted version. This is yet another example of the many ways the college experience has been altered by the pandemic. To the graduating class, I implore you to think not of what the pandemic has robbed you of, but what it has given you. In fact, this is a perspective we would all do well to adopt.

COVID-19 has forced each of us to find ways to adapt, endure, and overcome in our academic, professional, and personal lives. The last year-and-a-half or so has been an unsolicited education in how to live in crisis and to live with uncertainty. As a result, we’ve picked up new skills and honed existing ones; we’ve developed new and stronger relationships; we’ve become better prepared to take on a “normal” world and to be resilient and flexible. So, again, speaking directly to the Class of 2021, I say, think about how the last two years have prepared you for your next academic endeavor or the challenge of starting your professional career. I believe it’s fair to say that all of us have learned something that will change or improve our lives going forward.

To the students and faculty who will be returning in the fall, you can expect to see more of the Rochester experience you expected or remember. It will still be different—we still have more distance to put between ourselves and COVID-19. However, some of the differences will be because our experience has taught us how to do things better, regardless of the circumstances.

I hope the summer provides you the rest and renewal you so richly deserve, and lifts some of the pandemic-weight from your shoulders, along with any feelings of languishment. And not to immediately hurry along the summer, but the next you hear from me, I’ll be looking ahead to the fall semester.

Best wishes,

Gloria Culver
Dean
School of Arts & Sciences