Our Life on Lockdown: Week 2 of Student Video Diaries since the COVID-19 Outbreak

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Clare:

Alright, it is just about 9 a.m. and I am getting ready to go to work. This week I started working remotely for 13WMAZ as a producer. So I have been producing the midday shows from my dorm room, which is very interesting. I get up out of my bed and then I go to this separate office space I made for myself in my dorm because I’m the only one living here, so I have three extra rooms. So I go to this extra office space and I spend the day working. After all that work I now get to watch my show go on the air, which is very stressful especially when I’m not able to be in the booth boothing the show, advancing, like, graphics and making sure everything goes smoothly from the station. So not having that control for me is very stressful I just kind of have to watch it happen and not be able to do anything about it but seeing all that hard work go on air 3 hours after I started is like really rewarding so. I take a break for lunch and I make sure to get out of office, try to go into our living room area, eat some food and do some homework, and then go back to work. It’s a full day work except all from my dorm room, which is really crazy because the whole reason I’m saying in Macon and staying at Mercer is to keep working and so it’s just a lot different not being able to go into a station of work on having to stay here all the time, stay on campus, it’s a little rough.

Yasmeen:

“Hey, it’s Yasmeen, today if April 1st. I just made myself a cup of coffee even though its 4 p.m. because there are no rules.
I think these really scary and serious times are causing everyone to do a lot of self-reflection and forward thinking. Thinking about how this will affect us in a couple of months or what our lives are going to look like over the summer and even after that.
I sat down with my boyfriend Kalman DeMott, a Junior at Mercer to see how he is adjusting, or if any of his plans have changed.”

Maggie:

Hi guys! I’m Maggie Shannon and I’m a journalism student at Mercer University and I am quarantined in my house in Tifton, Georgia.
What I’ve been doing since quarantine, um, I’ve been reading a lot of books, all these books I wanted to read during the school year in some free time that I never got the chance to.
I’ve been spending a lot of time with family, my niece has been coming to my house almost every day to run around and play with me and my mom, my dad, and all of us just to get her energy out and get her out of her house, a change of scenery. It’s a very fun thing for me, for her to come because I love playing with her. She’s almost two so she’s a big ball of energy so it’s so fun.
The other day I also went through old pictures with my mom. That was really fun to see pictures of me as a baby, my brother as a baby, her and my dad before either one of us were born, so that was really cool.
I’ve also been keeping up with my schoolwork, like any student should be doing, making sure I do my Zoom classes, making sure I get my homework done and am on time with all of my tests, just keeping up with all of that because it’s a really big thing for us right now, especially because I’m about to start my senior year so I’m making sure my grades are the best they can be.
We’ve also been going to a local coffee shop. It’s a community-owned business so it gives money back to our community which is good in this time since some of these businesses could need help like that. And of course, drive thru only; sanitize, wash, we wipe down almost everything with a Clorox wipe at least twice a day just to make sure. You can’t be too safe during this time.
We’re also making sure no non-essential travel out of the house. It’s making us spend more time as a family, which is great. With me being in college, we really don’t get that family time a lot so it’s time for me to catch up, play board games with them, things like that. It’s a togetherness I didn’t know I was missing when I was at college that I’m finally getting back and it’s really great.
We’re all staying safe, we’re all making sure that we are healthy and staying clean, washing our hands, everything like that, and hoping all of this will be over soon so we can get back to the regular routine of life.

Richard:

Hello, my name is Richard Garcia and I’m a senior at Mercer University. As we all know, we are on quarantine and classes have been taken online. That’s fine with me, I’ve taken hundreds of online classes before. I also work at a pharmacy so I’m constantly there, and that makes doing my schoolwork kind of hard. But, you know, I try to space things out and try to do them. I try to do them on different days so I’m not constantly coming home from work and then spending the rest of my whole day doing my homework. I do wish I had more time to do things to take my mind off everything, but you got to do what you got to do I guess. I can talk about some things that I would do. I have a bunch of things in my room that I’m looking at now, and I wish I could actually do them. So, I have a bunch of games I need to finish that I haven’t gotten the time to over the years. Also, I really wish I could go out and take some photos. And then what really helps me relax is building model kits as weird as it sounds, which is very intricate and lets my mind just get in the zone and start building something, and that’s pretty much it.