As the head of the musical theater department, Amelia Broome has always considered Emerson a beautiful place to be—an environment full of “sassy, entrepreneurial, wonderful people.” But in her 26th year of teaching at the school, halfway through the spring semester, her hands-on, community-oriented classes came to a screeching halt.

Five years ago, on March 10, 2020, with COVID-19 rapidly spreading around the world, former Governor Charlie Baker declared a state of emergency in Massachusetts. Today, along with the 1918 influenza pandemic, it is considered the most disastrous infectious disease in modern times.

With close to 100 known cases of COVID-19 in Massachusetts at the time of the state of emergency, an email sent by former Emerson President Lee Pelton declared that Emerson’s last day of in-person classes on the Boston campus would be that Friday, March 13, 2020. Students would not return to in-person classes until August 2021.

“Once the school stopped functioning, I just remember seeing all of these people, especially seniors, sobbing in the hallways because their plans for commencement and graduation and everything was destroyed,” Broome said.

By late March, the spread of COVID-19 shut down schools, businesses, and governments globally, leaving behind the sense of familiarity and entering into a new era of uncertainty. 

Moving to a virtual classroom came with challenges for all academic departments at Emerson. According to Broome, it was especially complicated for performing arts students, who had to navigate through voice, stage, and technical lessons entirely online. 

“By the time that semester was over, everybody was absolutely wasted, wiped out with the stress, with the transfer of all of that [academic] information and the sense of what we were losing,” Broome said. “I don’t know if I’ve ever been that exhausted.” 

During the summer of 2020, the college continued its efforts to be prepared for the year ahead. The financial aid office announced that $1,367,157 of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act funding would be allocated to students and launched the One Emerson Knowledge Center, a platform that offered COVID-19 guidelines, information, and resources for the return to campus in the fall. 

The college also increased the staff in the Office of International Student Affairs to “better serve international students in the midst of the crisis,” wrote Andrea Popa, director of international student affairs, in a statement to The Beacon.

“It was scary at first, and the uncertainty of whether I’d be able to return to Singapore definitely hit me, especially after I landed in the U.S.,” said Susan Eyring, a 2024 graduate, who arrived at Emerson as an international student in the fall of 2020.

Eyring said she felt scared at times due to Asian hate sentiments. Nationwide, anti-Asian hate crimes surged by 149% in 2020. In Boston, it spiked by 133% for Asian people, who made up 10% of the city’s population, during the same time period. 

Within her first week at Emerson, Eyring witnessed a man screaming racial slurs at a Korean mother and her child near Boston Common.

“[He was] telling them to go back to China,” Eyring said. “The police in the Common didn’t do anything and everyone around them didn’t do anything. I just remember being scared that that could be me.”

Within the Emerson community, Eyring and her new classmates found innovative ways to connect and socialize. At the time, college policies only permitted students to have one guest per person living in a dorm room at a time.

“People would just stand in the hallways and congregate around our friends who lived in a triple [dorm]. Some people could be in the room and then the rest of us would sit in a semicircle outside,” she said. “If an RA ever came by, we could be like, ‘Oh, we’re actually following COVID policy.’” 

Eyring said the app Discord was another method people used to connect. Students would sit on calls and play video games under an unaffiliated “class of 2024” server.

“It was a lot of adapting, but I think Emerson students are great at that,” Eyring said. “We all just wanted to make friends at that point, so we’d do whatever.”

Even though most of the Emerson community has since returned to “pre-Covid” norms, some remain conscious of the impact of a disease that continues to infect thousands of people around the world daily.

“Having someone disabled by [long] COVID in my life has really dramatically changed my relationship to getting COVID and the idea of getting someone else sick, which is really scary,” said Chris Lee, who teaches Asian American studies and trans/queer people people of color critique.

Lee started teaching at Emerson this year and continues to wear a mask in the classroom and while performing day-to-day activities.

“[Masking] feels worthwhile for me, because my worldview is that COVID has not gone away, and is really horrifically impactful for a lot of people,” they said.

Long COVID, which the Centers for Disease Control defines as “a chronic condition that occurs after SARS-CoV-2 infection and is present for at least three months,” is still widely considered a medical mystery, but has disabled and fatigued over 20 million Americans.

Lee was a graduate student at Brown University when the pandemic first started, simultaneously teaching an asynchronous class. They said virtual office hours gave them a chance to see things about students’ lives that they would have never otherwise seen.

“I saw more aspects of their daily routine, and I think everyone was sort of like this in the first moments at Zoom. It was like, ‘Sorry, my parents are walking in the background’ or ‘I’m taking care of my grandma and she just wanders around sometimes,’” Lee said. “I felt very patient with that aspect because I just realized how difficult the world was and so I just wanted to make my little part of teaching as flexible and forgiving as possible.”

But not all environments were as forgiving. Daniel Ramos, a sophomore public relations student, spent almost a decade in the U.S. Army before coming to Emerson. In 2020, he was stationed in Fort Carson, a post in Colorado. 

Ramos said the pandemic was a “confusing” time for many members in the service in an army culture that could be at times dismissive of the mental health needs of members.

“In the army, they get really mad at you when you use the hospital any time whatsoever,” he said. “If you did have Covid and you were like ‘I need to get checked …’ they’d be like ‘Oh you’re a piece of shit, why aren’t you at work with the rest of them?’”

He said while the suicide rate among soldiers is already high, it was an issue that was fueled by the isolation of the pandemic. 

“[During Covid] we weren’t allowed to interact with each other like we were used to,” Ramos said. “Since we were all forced to lock down, you get stuck in your head and then that’s when these things happen.”

Global prevalence of anxiety and depression increased by 25% during the first year of the pandemic, according to the World Health Organization. Meeting the psychological and physical wellness of Emerson students was “top of mind” during the pandemic, Brandin Dear, Emerson’s Campus Health and Wellness director, wrote in a statement to The Beacon.

The college offered mental health and medical consultations virtually as well as a plethora of virtual mental health programming.

Regular email updates, COVID-19 virtual Q&A sessions, posters, and social media campaigns were among the efforts to keep the community informed. These were “all utilized with the intention of providing consistent updates on policies, the status of our campus and COVID-19, and evolving public health guidance,” according to Dear.  

Cameron Manning, a sports communications student who graduated in 2023, said the resources Emerson offered its students during the pandemic were “great,” “communicative,” and “transparent.” While part of him wishes he could’ve had a normal college experience, Manning is grateful for the lessons the pandemic taught him. 

“Life throws a bunch of curveballs and this was just one of them,” he said. “I wanted a different experience, but it’s the experience that I got. You take the moral wins from it, and you try to make the most of the experience with what you have.” 

Jonathan “Satch” Satriale, the technology director for the school of communications, said that his experience of working as a journalist for NY1 during the 9/11 attacks prepared him for the pandemic. In early March 2020, Satch started recording broadcast clips every day, which he continued to do for two and a half years.

“I realized we were in a moment,” he said. “Having been in the 9/11 moment … [and] just knowing that when you go through these big moments that you should try to capture them in some way.”

While Satch acknowledged “there’s a lot of scars still from that time” both mentally and socially, he was also able to draw a more positive conclusion.

“It showed us how to adapt, how to be more resilient, agile and that ability to work remotely and to figure out other ways to keep life going. That’s the big takeaway,” he said. “You can’t get so set in your ways or the ways of doing things because then when something big happens you’re not ready for it.”

Satch recalls joining his friend’s virtual “quarantunes” shows during quarantine, where the friend would play guitar to a group joined on a Zoom call, while Satch sat on his back porch and made a fire—something that made him feel like he was being social, he said. 

“We had to combine the virtual with the social,” Satch said. “That’s kind of how we got through it. That was a lot of what we learned and how we became a little bit better.”

Izzy Bryars of the Beacon staff contributed reporting to this story.