After graduating in the spring of 2020, college freshman Peter Michalski is enjoying life at Washington University. Not knowing what to expect on his way to college, he knew one thing for sure: he was not expecting this.

For Michalski, it was nice to be able to know the city and surrounding area. Because there are very few people in his class from the St. Louis area, he can show them around the city.

“The thing about Wash. U is that actually there are very few St. Louis people here, so I’ve kind of used that to my advantage on weekends and stuff. I like to take my friends and show them around the city, because that's COVID safe, because you’re outside exploring,” said Michaslki. “And also being close to home is nice. I've been home a few times so far, for family stuff. I think I'm coming up on two months being here this week. But even in that it's just really nice to just see everyone.”

Michalski spends time outdoors with friends, especially now when the weather and the actual campus are pretty. But there are still challenges, with one of the biggest changes of being in his dorm room all day. 

“During the school week it's a little rough because there are days where I just don't have any classes in person,” said Michalski. “I’ll wake up, I'll go get breakfast, so that's me leaving my room. Come back do my school stuff all day, start doing homework, and then the next time I leave my room is to get dinner. So, I do spend a lot of time in my dorm room, but I mean, I've gotten comfortable with it. I've gotten used to it more than anything. Those first couple weeks were a little rough. I'm getting used to being in one place for so long. … It's a really small dorm room but it's my sleeping space for a year. I'm doing the class here, I do my homework here, I workout in here, I read you know. It's everything in this room.”

Every college in America has had to make changes in protocols for students. For Wash. U, the big two were housing and food plans. The whole campus has been spaced out with fewer people. But one good thing for Michalski is that Wash. U has partnered with GrubHub so he can easily get food whenever he wants. 

Going into WashU, Michalski knew that it wasn’t going to be easy and he would have to do a lot of work to be in a good academic place. But for him, so far it has been manageable.

“I think it's about what I expected, difficulty-wise. This is a selective school and I expected to have my work cut out for me and I do, but it's good. I never feel like I'm overwhelmed or doing busy work, and everything I'm doing has a reason.” Said Michalski, “I'm in a good spot right now academics-wise, I don't know if that relates to COVID or anything, that's kind of just general college stuff. But yeah, maybe next semester I'll be way over my head. We’ll see.” 

Even though Michalski has only been in college for a few months, there was a lot of excitement surrounding Halloween. 

“Everyone was kind of very much on edge on Halloween, because people wanted to sell it. Halloween on a Saturday night man, that's a rare occurrence,” said Michalski. “But there are ways to have fun and be safe, like I got together with some friends and we watched a movie and we played some card games and kind of hung out. And we were safe about it, which was good. And that's totally possible. I know it's probably pretty likely that a lot of people weren't safe about it, but it was absolutely possible to have a fun safe Halloween.” 

As the first few weeks of college were hard, Michalski missed out on many things that would happen in a normal college year, such as floor parties and getting to know his floormates. But overall Michalski thinks that WashU has done a good job handling Covid and will continue to do well in the future. 

“Because if you think about it, in a normal year of college, in your first weeks you're out socializing. Your floor is having stuff, your dorm is having stuff, everyone is having stuff that's intentionally designed for you to meet other people. None of that happened this year,” said Michalski. “I think that's one of the big factors is just it takes longer. But it is definitely possible though, I don't want to scare anyone and just be like, oh, you can’t have friends.”

Michalski feels safe at the school, but does wish that Wash. U had more testing.

“Because Wash. U is the front lines of the research regarding COVID, I trust pretty much any of their policies that they're going to tell us, the one thing I would hopefully get is more frequent testing. As of now, all the entire student body is doing bi-weekly testing,” said Michalski. “But I've read studies that say, especially for the colleges that have access to this sort of stuff, the best way is to get tested every few days. So that's the one big thing I think we could be doing a little better. But the fact that I have the ability to get tested every two weeks is extremely helpful. I'm very lucky that I have that.”