Cooper Christian started going to college last fall. Covid-19 has been around for about one and a half years now and has certainly had an impact on his college experience so far.

Cooper Christian is a Sophomore at Morningside University in Sioux City, Iowa. His decision to go there wasn’t really influenced by the virus since he made it in December 2019, a few months before the Corona virus hit the world.

Christian wasn’t really scared of the virus in the first place. “It sounded like a common flu,” he says. After he ended up getting Covid himself and not experiencing any severe symptoms, he didn’t worry about it at all anymore. 

That was before coming to Morningside. Therefore, it didn’t really impact his social life. Whereas other students preferred to stay in their rooms, Christian still wanted to go out and not let Covid hinder his college experience too much.

However, his college experience was affected by it in some ways. Christian is from a small town in Iowa, where people didn’t have to wear masks or do social distancing. When he came to Morningside that changed.

“Last year, it was weird,” Cooper states. “You had to wear masks all the time, wherever you went, which was just weird,” he explains. The university operated on “Level Orange” in Christian’s first year. Classes were cut in half or held online.

Many students, including Christian, seem to find online classes difficult. According to Christian, it was “hard to pay attention during an online class, like, I would just play xbox or something.”

His second year of college tends to be a bit more normal since the number of Covid cases has decreased, and Morningside is now operating on “Level Green.”