Myself with Covid

 My name is Luke Barrera. Being born and raised just outside Houston, Texas and then coming 1000 miles for college could strain things just a little bit when it comes to relations back home. I am a 19 year old Hispanic/White sophomore student at the University of Kentucky. I would say back home that i reside fairly comfortably in the middle class suburbs. My high school days were pretty easy. Our school had roughly 3000 kids and about 800 in our graduating class but everyone kind of new each other one way or another. I decided to travel far for college to start fresh, not that i needed to, without knowing a single person here. So far I'd say it has gone pretty well. I know a good chunk of people, have that one solid friend group that would always hang out, and I'm getting involved more than I expected to. Then the Corona-virus hit and slowed things down a little bit. School activities were being shut down one by one, more and more students were going home and staying home, and online classes were becoming normal. Me personally, I went home for spring break with one backpack of clothes and my laptop thinking I we would at least go back and finish the semester. Then they extended spring break for 2 extra weeks, and eventually went online for the rest of the 2020 spring semester. All my clothes, pillows, supplies, bathroom stuff was left in my dorm room. They told us to go back to campus and move out of the residency halls at the end of spring break, but there was no way I was going to spend hundreds of dollars just to go back for a couple hours, pack everything up and go home. I was lucky enough to have roommate who's family lived in Lexington and were nice enough to pack up my stuff for me and store it at their place until fall semester.

During the pandemic, I had it going pretty well. My and my girlfriend only went back and forth from each others houses and didn't really go anywhere except the grocery store and occasional fast food. We went to have lunch with my grandparents every Sunday so we knew we had to be careful anywhere we went. Living in Houston, a Covid hot spot, wasn't too bad considering the image that was plastered on the news for what its like to be in a hot spot. Nobody in my family or extended family got sick, I only knew of 2 friends who got it so it never really seemed too bad on the outside either. Coming back to campus wasn't too harsh of a transition. We drove up, so the scariest part was staying in hotel rooms that we couldn't be certain if they were actually clean. But we made it here, I tested negative, my family made it back home safely, and now I'm stuck in my dorm only leaving to get food and go to 1 class a week. It's ironic that it can be a little overwhelming not having anything to do knowing you are on a large college campus, but it's going well so far and I can only hope that it continues to go well.