An Interview with GHS Graduate Joe McInnis

Emily McInnis ‘21

COVID-19 has changed many things, and college is no exception. Students attending college during the 2020-21 school years have experienced some notable changes from the usual ‘college experience’ we so often hear about. Simple experiences like attending classes, having roommates, and going to parties have been altered or eliminated entirely. Instead, students are taking online classes from their homes or dorms, and the few in-person classes that do take place are done with mandatory mask-wearing and adequate physical distancing.

Emily McInnis (‘21) sat down with Class of 2020 Greenport High School graduate and former Quill Editor-in-Chief Joe McInnis to discuss his experiences as a first-year at Dartmouth College during the COVID-19 pandemic. He recently returned from his first trimester at the college, and is taking his second at home.

What was the beginning of the year like?

“We got a test sent to us before arriving on campus so they would know we were negative. For the first two weeks we were quarantined in our rooms and could really barely leave, we could only leave to go to a testing site on campus to be tested or to get food. In those first couple of weeks they would prepare food and bring it to us in tents outside every dorm building. It wasn't amazing food, it wasn't as good as the regular Dartmouth food, but it was still pretty good. And then from that point forward, once we had gotten out of quarantine, we would go to socially distanced dining halls, and we could get either take-out or eat in the dining hall at socially distanced lunch tables.”

How has the rooming situation changed this year?

“The school was at half capacity because they only let Freshmen and Juniors on campus. At Dartmouth, we work on the trimester system so we have three terms per year, it works a little differently there. Dartmouth is one of the only schools that does that. Firstly, they prioritized freshmen so we could get as close to a regular experience as possible, and I think Juniors working on their majors was part of the reason they wanted to let them on campus. We were at half capacity because of that - about 2000 students.”

How was the rooming situation impacted?

“They started by reducing the capacity, and that allowed them to give us all individual dorm rooms, with a few exceptions. Initially they said everybody was going to get a single room, but there were a few rooms per dorm building that were two-room doubles by design, so there were roommates given in that case. But at max, two to a room.”

What was it like to take your classes online?

“There's less stress in that you’re not running around campus to get to classes, and as this is my first term I don't really have a sense of what exactly it was like running around campus, but that's a factor that you don't have to think about when you're building your schedule - how much time you have. For that reason, what I did, and what a lot of other kids did, was schedule all of our classes one after another in the same afternoon with only a 15 minute break in between. It's a different kind of fatigue, “Zoom fatigue,” as they seem to call it, from spending a whole afternoon looking at a screen rather than running to classes. It's kind of a different lifestyle, but it is kind of nice being able to get out of a class and flop onto your bed [laughs].”

“Spanish was my one in-person class. Once a week it would be in person instead of online, they would get us a room wherever they could on campus. In our case it was in a life sciences building, but it worked.”

How were the rules enforced?

“Even more so than breaking any of the rules of Dartmouth, like drinking, kids would get kicked off of campus no matter what for violating COVID rules. The official numbers vary, but an unknown number of students were kicked off, and the rumor mill would say things like ‘100 this weekend’ or ‘80-something last weekend’ so they were definitely enforcing COVID rules more than anything else.”

What were the social activities like, in terms of sports, clubs, and making friends?

“They did have some practices for sports, I don't know how they distanced those, but normally you’re allowed to move around the campus as long as you’re wearing a mask. You didn't see anyone not wearing a mask in public, and coming back to Greenport ... I didn't realize what Greenport was missing, almost, until I was away for three months. On the streets of Hanover, New Hampshire, where Dartmouth is, it was unfathomable what would happen if you took off your mask. No one would be caught without a mask. And that all happened while weekly tests were being administered so you knew with relative confidence that whoever you were interacting with would've been tested negatively very recently. Everything was just so heavily enforced which made it a little difficult to make friends, but really as long as you are wearing a mask, you could move pretty freely. There were Dartmouth sanctioned events specifically to try to make the most of this and try to get people meeting each other that you could navigate online. For example, I went to make cider one day using engineering tools and I met a really great friend of mine there.”

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The community came together and found new ways to connect while more apart than before. “One of my professors, a biology professor, during midterms, once did a 72 hour or more stint of digital office hours just in case we had any questions on our two week long midterm,” Joe explains. On a similar note, “During the election, there were chalk drawings all over, imploring us to vote for Biden and Harris, and to vote in New Hampshire because our school could swing the state blue, so that was something to bring us all together, everyone except the economics students.”

Keep in mind that Dartmouth may function differently from other schools due to its high endowment, or availability of funds. Though this changes its response to the pandemic, it can still serve as a good example for those wondering how colleges and universities are handling things. Joe hopes that other schools will follow suit in making their campuses as safe as possible. He leaves us on this important note: “The most important thing of all during all this was that Domino's Pizza still delivered to our dorms.”

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.