My first taste of the tech world was in high school through a required Introduction to Computer Science course. That entire semester I was bored and listless, not fully able to grasp the power of programming without concrete examples of applications in the real world. The closest I got to understanding how code could be implemented in the real world was building Fruit Ninja in Racket.

I’ll eventually write about the end of my senior year of college, my summer, and the start of my Masters program, but I don’t feel comfortable doing so until I address the virus that has been plaguing the country (and the world as a whole!) for centuries. Racism.

While most students have left Ithaca, New York, the quaint city Cornell is located in, due to an administrative order for students to move out of on-campus housing — a proactive measure against the COVID-19 crisis — and as the spring term comes to a close, Caitlin Stanton stays in her apartment near the campus. Since the university has transitioned to online classes, Caitlin has had to grapple with the dichotomy between social distancing and a normally collaborative engineering environment.

Almost two weeks ago, I held my last Chapter meeting as the president of the Beta Chi chapter of Alpha Omega Epsilon. To all 50 of you who I’m grateful to be able to call my sisters: thank you for everything.

This past April, I flew to Cupertino on a whim to give a TED Talks. Being only 20 years old at the time, I was completely out of my comfort zone, from seeing invitation in my LinkedIn inbox to taking my first steps onto that stage. Looking back, however, it was honestly one of the greatest decisions I've ever made—it gave me the chance to speak on a national platform, which was something I didn't even think I'd get to do in my career, let alone before graduating college.

Internships, much like every other new experience, start off with the same kinds of hopes and intentions. You come in eager to meet new people, build cool products, and learn new tech. This summer was especially exciting: I would be working in a new place with electrical engineers on a hardware-related project. In all honesty, when I landed in Seattle sleep-deprived and lugging all of my suitcases, I couldn’t stop smiling.

Little did I know what would happen twelve weeks later.

If I’m not bringing my work home with me, what have I been doing for the past six weeks? To put it bluntly, a metric butt ton.

I spent my last night of junior year studying in Duffield, frantically cramming telecom notes into my head while my mom helped pack up my room, rather than hanging out with my friends or going to bed at a decent time. In all honesty, however, how I spent my last night was pretty representative of how I spent my entire year.

Saturday morning I was taking my last final as a junior and Monday morning I was going to New Employee Orientation to kick off my summer as an electrical engineering intern.

“The Earth is what we all have in common.”

— Wendell Berry