When Amy Murray, a senior Film and Digital Media Student at Baylor University, was offered the chance to spend a semester working and studying in New York City, she thought it was a dream come true.
“I was thinking that New York would be like, the best opportunity for me. Considering my major being film, that I could be here and work in real TV and hopefully get some good opportunities to work with actual production companies that people have heard of,” said Murray.
Murray joined 15 other students, many of them seniors, to participate in the Baylor in New York Program, an immersive educational experience designed to bridge the gap between the academic and professional worlds of film and television. The students moved into an apartment complex together in Queens, where they planned to take classes in person with professors while also interning for a variety of film and multimedia companies.
That is, until COVID-19 cases erupted in New York City, forcing citizens indoors, businesses to close, and in-person interaction to all but cease.
According to Kareem El Arab, another senior in the program, what began as an exciting opportunity quickly soured as one by one, students were let go from their internships.
“It was so promising, like everything felt like it was on the right track…I was in the New York program for my last semester, and then it got ripped out of my hands.”
El Arab said that many of the students saw their internships as a legitimate opportunity at finding employment after graduation. His boss at Mark Saks Casting even voiced his enthusiasm about Kareem’s work over dinner just before he and his classmates were abruptly told to quarantine in their apartments.
“He was like, ‘I see a bright future,’ and then the next day, none of us were allowed to go to our internships anymore.”
Internships weren’t the only thing lost to the pandemic; according to the students, what had once been class sessions filled with vibrant discussions and ample learning quickly became a chaotic mix of zoom calls, text chains, and confusion.
According to Murray, “as soon as the classes went into normal lecture mode, it made it feel like being in New York was kind of pointless. This all happened, and it kind of like forced us to go back to normal school but trapped in a 800 square foot apartment.”
Kate Lucky, an Adjunct Lecturer for the New York program who began the semester instructing the students in a discussion based course on communication and culture, praised the students for their resiliency but acknowledged the difficulty of transitioning to a remote learning format.
“We couldn’t have the same kinds of discussions anymore. We had some discussions over zoom; students were good about raising their hands and hearing themselves and being patient when I shared power points and videos, but it was really difficult to get organic conversation going. There’s no rapid fire debate on zoom, there’s no sudden disagreement or sudden agreement or laughter. The energy is just really different, so it feels more like individual students responding to me rather than responding to each other.”
Though most students faced immediate pressure from family and friends to return to their home towns, where caseloads were much lower, many elected to stay through the semester, citing a desire to rough it out alongside their classmates and a fear that they’d bring the infection along with them.
“I mean I had a ton of pressure from my family to go back to California, but honestly it didn’t seem like a safe move for me to go back for the benefit of my family. Like I never questioned that it would be beneficial for me, just because there weren’t as many cases in California, but if I was sick I would feel absolutely terrible,” said Murray.
Now cautiously traveling home and looking ahead to uncertain futures, a broken economy, and a fast approaching displacement from their peers without the certainty of a graduation ceremony or senior week to ease their fall, the students say that their main focus is to concentrate on the things that they can control.
“I’m taking it day by day…I’m not really stressing out about anything. Like nothing’s going to happen tomorrow, nothing’s going to happen next week, you know? Everything is just shut down. All these applications that people are turning in are piling up, only for other people in that company to get fired and stuff right now. Like it just is not the time…I’m going to get a job, I just know I am. And I’ll wait for it,” said El Arab, now quarantined at his home in Arlington, Texas.
Though the semester did not go quite as planned, Lucky expressed optimism that the students were able to grow from their experience in the city.
“They experienced a New York really different than the one I hoped they would, but also one really authentic to the struggles and also the joys of this city, and I hope they carry that with them.”
With KWBU News, I’m Sam Cedar.