Penn State’s HUB-Robeson Center in the potential post-pandemic
Maskless in the Wild
While walking through its halls and striding up its stairs, the HUB-Robeson center clearly looks different.
Its murals haven’t changed. The shops remain the same. The hustle and bustle still goes on as usual.
In fact, the masses of people the complex contains are the same faces who could have been seen there months ago — the top halves of them anyway.
But now, in early April, after spring break and before finals, the center of Penn State’s student life has taken on a new character as the characters who reside in it have taken off an old appendage.
The masks, which so defined the pandemic status of State College have all but disappeared, and an air of something new has taken over.
“Except for the fact that everyone is still tentative,” Paul Gabrys said.
Sitting alone and unmasked just outside the perimeter of the HUB’s buffet, Gabrys (senior-veterinary and biomedical sciences) said Penn State is “not quite there.”
Having experienced Penn State in a pre-pandemic, ultra-pandemic and now potentially post-pandemic state, he said things are better but not solved.
Sitting with a University of Pennsylvania t-shirt, Gabrys said he believes this “cycle” of the pandemic may be over, though the coming winter may begin yet another wave.
The senior said he was infected with the coronavirus about a year ago, losing his taste and smell. But it wasn’t all bad.
The pandemic, he said, allowed him more time to spend with his family. And his decreased workload from school let him pick hobbies back up, which he had previously let lay.
“Overall, the pandemic was more positive than negative for me,” Gabrys said.
But that doesn’t mean it’s over, he said. Not until a potential winter wave fails to emerge or is actively controlled.
Up the high school musical stairs, which rise from the HUB’s cafeteria area to the first floor, George Angelakis, a hoodie-clad student, sat on some cushions near the wall which displays Penn State’s alma mater.
He too said he is not exactly “over” the pandemic, but he does support the recent efforts “to get back to normal.”
“We’ve never really seen anything like this, but obviously it takes time,” Angelakis (sophomore-supply chain management) said.
Like Gabrys, he was infected with coronavirus but in different circumstances.
The sophomore caught the virus in the first semester of his freshman year, forcing him to quarantine ten days.
It was a “weird” experience, he said. But the sudden maskless world of the HUB was also “weird,” he said.
“I didn’t really know what college was. So, I kind of grew into the pandemic,” Angelakis said. “But now, I’m starting to get what the actual college experience is kind of like.”
By his estimation, all things remaining well, the pandemic may be a thing of the past by the end of the summer months, he said.
Thirty yards away and unbeknownst to each other, Kaitlyn Wilburn, a student studying on her laptop, expressed nearly the same sentiments.
“It feels like I’m almost a freshman because of all the newer things I’m experiencing,” she said.
As she sat next to the broad glass panes which separate students from the HUB’s rooftop garden, Wilburn (sophomore-rehabilitation and human services) said, however, that things felt broadly normal to her.
She and her family, she said, still keep the pandemic in mind and stay updated, though it “doesn’t really stop them from doing anything anymore,” Wilburn said.
“I feel like maybe around February it started feeling normal again, and then taking off the masks and all that made it feel even more normal,” she said.
Walking down the corridor which displays the maps of Penn State campuses and into the HUB lobby, Alysha Ulrich sat leisurely near the windows.
She said after months of dealing with the social and mental effects of the coronavirus, she too has been ready to call it quits on the pandemic.
Though she avoided the disease itself, it has still done harm to her “family dynamic,” according to Ulrich (junior-earth science and policy).
She hardly ever gets the chance to see her extended family, Ulrich said, and she has watched her grandparents “essentially become recluses.”
But after being vaccinated in the fall and seeing others follow suit, she felt things could begin to change.
“To me, for that reason, I’m more comfortable with not masking and moving away from restrictions of being in the pandemic,” Ulrich said.
Masks, she said, have become a “social barrier,” something not present in her freshman year.
Though AirPods haven’t helped either, she admitted.
But sitting fifty yards away with his back to the HUB’s first floor balcony, student Michael Biesecker, offered a different perspective.
Though maskless himself, he said it seemed that new lifting of restrictions seemed to be institutions like the government and universities “throwing their hands up” without considering what may be “best practice.”
“But it is nice that [the mask mandate] is over, especially after two years of everything that’s happened,” Biesecker (junior-environmental resource management) said. “But it’s pretty complicated. I don’t really see the masks being off as [the pandemic] being over.”
Though he said it was “not ideal,” Biesecker never really minded masking and social distancing, though online classes weren’t his preference, he said.
The ultimate end of the pandemic, he said, will not be a stark line which is easily defined.
Leaning back in his green HUB chair, Biesecker compared the end of the pandemic to the end of the Afghanistan War.
He said as the media stops reporting and people talk less and less about it, it will slowly fade to the past tense.
Back across the first floor, closer to Alumni Hall where a blood drive was taking place, Blake George sat maskless with his headphones in.
Like others, George (senior-electrical engineering) said he believes the world is in “a good spot” during the pandemic and is happy about recent masking policy updates.
Though he said he is over the pandemic, some of his family members and friends are still quite concerned with the two-year-long ordeal.
“I think some people are still wary of it, and I think you have to be respectful of that,” George said.
Regardless of position, however, George said he believes the pandemic has made people more empathetic and aware of one another.
The mutual struggle of all may just prove a greater force than the coronavirus — whenever it may end.
“There have been positives and negatives to it. It’s impacted my life in both positive and negative ways,” he said. “And I think that, overall, we’re going to come out of this better people.”
Analyzing the Wild from an office
A quarter mile away and five stories above ground, Daniel DellaPosta does his sociological research on political polarization and social network analysis.
An assistant professor at Penn State for the past five years, DellaPosta said the pandemic has opened up many new areas of research in social sciences, though more long-term analyses will be required by sociologists.
But for now, he said he believes two elements play into masking in public: wanting to effectively protect one’s self and feelings of social judgment.
“Wearing the mask became, I think rightly, a kind of sign that you were showing concern, not just for yourself but also for others, and that you were willing to make some sort of small sacrifice on behalf of public health,” DellaPosta said.
In effect, people do not want to appear careless in front of others, he said.
But in the current state of things, without stark rules to delineate where and when to mask or how to treat the pandemic, Dellaposta said people’s actions are more situational.
On the first day without a mask mandate in classes, he said he taught back to back classes. In one room, students were almost entirely unmasked, while the next saw a crowd that appeared mid-pandemic, he said.
But by the end of the week, he said nearly everyone had chosen to unmask.
“In each social situation, there are different sorts of cues and signs, different ways that people are communicating what the social expectations are now,” he said. “And I think people adjust their behavior based on those signals.”
