‘Where’s the chaos’?: At Pitt’s move-in day, a surreal silence amid a pandemic
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The University of Pittsburgh’s move-in day this year was, for perhaps the first time, a quiet one.
The usual throngs of students and parents were instead just sporadic groups that trickled across campus. Traffic moved freely on Forbes and Fifth avenues. There were no lines for parking lots, no waiting for a cart to free up to pile high with pillows and snacks just to wait in line for an elevator in Litchfield Towers.
“Where’s the chaos?” asked Iwan Fuchs as he unloaded his car on University Place between Soldiers & Sailors and Nordenberg Hall.
His son, 18-year-old Johann Fuchs, was among the freshmen Tuesday moving into campus housing for the first time — a surreal experience made even more surreal by the fact it was in the midst of a global pandemic.
Pitt’s plans to allow students to return to campus for the fall semester took months to draw up, and they include a compressed schedule and housing a quarter of incoming students in Oakland-area hotels.
Even the lack of chaos was planned — arrival dates and times for students living on campus are staggered to keep crowds to a minimum, and students moving into on-campus housing must quarantine for seven days before arriving and for seven days after.
Classes are scheduled to start Aug. 24.
Classes will be a mix of online and in-person, and students with virtual classes can still choose to live on campus. It’s a choice Johann Fuchs made, and he said he appreciates the myriad safety precautions.
“I feel like I just wanted the experience,” he said. “I wanted the city feel. I really didn’t want to miss out.”
The university also has announced it will conduct covid-19 surveillance testing among students. That means any student — living on or off campus, graduate or undergraduate — could receive an email directing them to take part in self-administered virus testing.
“Together with our phased arrival approach, sheltering-in-place strategy and daily symptom screens, we will be able to closely monitor the prevalence of covid-19 on our campus and help ensure a safer start to the fall term,” the university’s Covid-19 Medical Response Team wrote in an email to students.
Students who receive an email to be tested are given a time slot during which they must report to an outdoor testing center near Posvar Hall. There, they will be given a self-test kit and walked through the process.
The random testing begins Wednesday, and incoming freshman Shamarraa Dudley will be among the first students tested.
Dudley said she thought in-person classes would be a better opportunity for her in terms of a learning experience as opposed to online classes.
Plus, like Fuchs, she said she wanted the college experience.
As far as the covid-19 pandemic goes, she said, she’s nervous for the self-administered nasal swab test she has to take Wednesday, but she’s otherwise unbothered by the stepped-up safety precautions.
“I’m kind of at the point where it’s, like, what can you do other than what you’re supposed to do?” she said.