Letter to the editor: COVID-19 didn’t take away my senior year. I did.

Editor’s Note: To submit a response to this column, or submit a letter to the editor on a new topic, email your submission to opinion@usustatesman.com.

Well, here we are, Aggies! Welcome to the final weeks of the Spring 2020 semester! Not what you expected? Me either. I planned on going to PoBev, High Stakes Bingo, a Campfire in Logan Canyon, my graduation ceremony, and the list goes on… As a Wisconsin native, I just moved 1,200mi eastward two months early only to sit and ponder: Who managed to rob me of my senior year?

After a lot of thought, I realize there’s only one person to blame: Me. It’s not the locals of Wuhan, China for bad food market standards, it’s not President Trump for ignoring health warnings, and it’s not anyone else for lacking a sizable balance in their savings account. Any one of these would have diminished or prevented today’s crisis—a widely misused word now with a valid, modern example—but none of it was in my direct control. I don’t have a say in Chinese regulations, I couldn’t even vote in 2016, and I’ve saved what I could. So how could I have robbed myself?

I wasn’t prepared for this—few of us were. That does not mean we should all dig fallout shelters or graves, but we need to remember how much of the world is not in our control and never will be. But remember, this is my senior year—our senior year. It is in our control. We need to respect the constraints we’ve been given but not let them stop us. We need to remind ourselves of our humanity: We have physical limits but an infinite ability to create. The power to create novel ideas is driven by our attitude, knowledge, and imagination—again, things that lie entirely in our control!

We are the class of 2020: Artists, Scientists, and Interdisciplinarians that know how to adapt our world in the age of social distancing! We are a generation that lives and breathes contactless communication, commerce, and consumption. We need to capitalize this opportunity to show other generations how and why we behave the way we do. As once-in-a-lifetime crises attack everyone’s ways of life, we should create once-in-a-lifetime solutions that adapt everyone to excel beyond the past and into the new normal.

Someone did rob me of my senior year. It was me. Don’t let you rob yourself.

Covid-19 has seized the world; let’s take it back, Aggies.

⁠-Robbie Spofford

Robbie Spofford is a graduating senior with an Economics major and Math minor, but during his tenure at USU, Robbie completed numerous courses in Aviation, Music, and Physics. Post-graduation, Robbie intends to pursue a Master’s degree in Creativity Studies focusing on the intersection of qualitative and quantitative research.