By Lily Reavis '21
Editor-in-Chief
J.J. DiPietro left behind a different life when she chose to return to college as a nontraditionally aged student in 2018. She enrolled at Holyoke Community College for two years before moving to South Hadley, MA, and enrolling at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. For DiPietro, the switch to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic was a welcome change. Her two small dogs, privately-owned cleaning business and general responsibilities of being an adult in college all benefited from the extra time spent at home. When UMass shifted to hybrid in-person and online learning this semester, though, DiPietro realized she was expected to travel to campus and participate in in-person events far more than she felt comfortable with.
Living 30 minutes from campus with a relatively rigid schedule, she found it hard to keep up with twice-weekly student testing, and her professors were slow to communicate about required in-person activities. Now, DiPietro feels uncomfortable returning to campus due to the recent COVID-19 outbreak among students, and she’s found that faculty and administration are less flexible than previously during the pandemic.
“Very few of the professors are even giving extensions and more take the stance of, you know, ‘If you just can’t do it, you need to drop the class,’” she explained.
DiPietro is taking a hybrid mechanical engineering lab this semester. The course is a 300-level, meaning it’s mostly made up of upperclass students. In order to comply with the social distancing measures outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the students were split into several sets of partners this semester. Only six pairs are allowed inside the lab at any given time, and each is expected to attend three in-person lab sessions throughout the semester.
Aside from those three sessions, DiPietro will remain in her off-campus housing for the entire semester. Living in South Hadley, she’s roughly 12 miles from campus, which adds up to a travel time of 20 minutes by car and 40 minutes by public transportation. Despite this distance and plans to stay off campus, DiPietro is still required to make the trek twice weekly in order to get tested and uphold the UMass student contract.
Remote learning, in-person parenting
Robin Gencarelle, a senior and nontraditionally aged student at UMass, has run into a similar issue while living off-campus. She lives in Easthampton — a few miles further from campus than South Hadley — and is taking no in-person classes this semester. As a painting major, her coursework generally doesn’t require a trip to campus, since there are no labs or collaborative requirements on her syllabi. Still, she says that the university’s communication has been limited and slow in the wake of recent off-campus outbreaks. To Gencarelle, it can feel unsafe to enter the campus community to receive testing because of its high case numbers.
“There were frats having parties. And then there were like 400 people that tested positive in a weekend,” she explained, referring to a significant February on- and off-campus outbreak. “So we had to get shut down for two weeks. And then we just reopened and they want us to go get tested twice a week. … It’s a half an hour one way. So that’s two hours a week that I would have to spend driving to get tested. I can’t do that.”
Gencarelle is a single parent to a 5-year-old daughter who is currently attending hybrid online and in-person kindergarten. “It’s pretty much impossible to do things with her around. I love her to death, but she just needs a lot of attention,” Gencarelle said. “She gets a lot of anxiety.”
Gencarelle’s course schedule does not line up with her daughter’s kindergarten classes either, which can result in her joining in on college lectures, demanding to be held while Gencarelle is giving presentations and otherwise needing attention at inopportune times. Professors have been generally understanding and lenient about this, and learning from home has been largely beneficial for Gencarelle. For her, being remote means being able to shift her schedule around her daughter’s needs with a quick email.
But in her last semester at UMass, Gencarelle is unable to stay completely off campus. She is currently writing a thesis, which requires her to meet in person with committee members.
Working from her two-bedroom apartment and with only an iPhone for a camera, she says that it’s impossible to accurately photograph her work for her professors. So, every so often when an adviser asks to meet, Gencarelle loads her artwork and supplies into her car to drive to campus — after testing negative through the university.
DiPietro believes that this testing requirement makes sense for students living on campus or in the immediate vicinity but is potentially dangerous for students like herself who are living farther away. For her, it would be easier to learn from a fully remote setting in which she would not have to expose herself to public transportation or the campus community.
Hybrid learning complicates in-person participation
For students living off campus at UMass, missing COVID-19 tests can have drastic consequences.
“If we were not in compliance, and we missed a green check where we weren’t getting tested twice a week, … we were gonna have Moodle access denied,” DiPietro explained. “It’s where we get all of our information, where we submit our homework assignments and quizzes and everything.”
After one of DiPietro’s gender studies professors heard that the college intended to restrict Moodle access for off-campus students who did not get tested twice weekly, she chose to take matters into her own hands.
“She thinks it’s crazy,” DiPietro explained. “[The testing requirement] overlooks marginalized members of our community, people who are less able to get in and be tested, people who don’t live on campus. … She ended up giving us her guest passwords on Moodle just in case we had Moodle access removed.”
DiPietro agrees — leaving her quarantine bubble and entering the campus community just to receive a COVID-19 test can feel counterintuitive when she would otherwise stay at home.
Gencarelle, on the other hand, feels relatively safe with the rate at which she is required to visit campus. What’s more difficult is her daughter’s kindergarten schedule in Easthampton, which is currently operating one week on, one week off in half days. The schedule is confusing for her daughter, who needs a more consistent routine to fully succeed, according to Gencarelle.
While her professors at UMass have been understanding about Gencarelle’s position as a single parent, her schedule has been altered to accommodate her daughter’s schedule multiple times. She handles drop-offs and pickups, meals, online classes, visits with her child’s father, parent-teacher conferences and the day-to-day needs of her child, which pushes her schoolwork down on her list of responsibilities.
Often, Gencarelle finds herself working on detailed paintings in her spare bedroom in the middle of the night, after her daughter goes to sleep.
“I feel like I can figure my stuff out. And if I have any issues, I can talk to my professors,” Gencarelle explained. But the pressure of her constantly changing schedule, coupled with worries about her daughter’s socialization, is a difficult weight to bear.
The instability of UMass’ schedule has been complicated for other nontraditionally aged students as well. A few weeks ago, DiPietro ran into trouble when her mechanical engineering professor announced on a Friday afternoon that her group would be in person in the lab the following Tuesday. “I … got an email the Friday before the Tuesday that we were supposed to have the lab — Friday at 4:30 p.m. — from my professors saying, you know, ‘We’re not virtual anymore,’” she explained. “‘Next week, we are going to be meeting face-to-face and if you can’t make it, withdraw from the class,’” DiPietro recounted.
She was unable to get tested that weekend. UMass’ COVID-19 testing program is closed from 5 p.m. Friday through the weekend. Even if DiPietro had driven to campus the moment she received the email, she would have been unlikely to receive a test that day. If she went on Monday, she was unsure that results would come back in time. “Your test results will be ready in 24 to 36 hours,” the university’s COVID-19 testing program webpage reads.
Still, DiPietro was expected to attend class that Tuesday. “A lot of people did go to the lab,” she explained. Between the snowstorm that passed through that day, her uncertainty about being properly tested and the short notice of her in-person requirement, she chose not to attend the lab session. “I mean, it’s just something I couldn’t do,” she said. “I thought, ‘Well, what if I had had, you know, tested positive? They wouldn’t have let me make up the lab.’”
Instead, she emailed her adviser, a dean and the chancellor, hoping to secure an excuse for missing the in-person component of her course. “Basically, everybody said the professor is well within his rights to make these calls. And really, it seemed like no help,” she explained. “I just felt like I have to be right enough to have this decision overturned.”
Instead, DiPietro changed her enrollment status in the class from graded to pass/fail. She hopes that, even having missed one in-person lab, she receives enough credit hours to pass the course and continue her degree program.
“It’s several thousand dollars that I forfeit if I withdraw [from] this class at this time,” DiPietro said. “It’s one thing if the campus is offering a refund. I mean, they just were giving [us] absolutely no time to make the consideration. I just thought … it’s really tough.”