This year has been a terrible one, and it has been hard on all of us. We thank the Dickinson faculty and administration for staying by our side and helping us all along the way.

            However, the recently-released plan for the Spring semester seems misguided and ineffective for all of the student body.

            The plan is for the Freshmen and Sophomores to be on campus in single rooms until spring break, at which point they’ll be swapped out for the Juniors and Seniors. That is six weeks that each class will get to be on campus (while allowed to do very little).

            There are many problems with this plan, but chief among these are as follows:

            The relatively short time period that we will be on campus, combined with the costs of room and board and the prospect of being stuck in a room in dreary January and February weather, are huge deterrents. If our options are that and simply staying at home without the cost of room and board, why would we take the first option?

            Additionally, while this plan may work for those of us who are in PA or states bordering on PA, anyone who lives more than five hours away from campus is looking at a massive drive carrying all of their belongings to be put in a room by themselves, only to have the process repeated a little over a month later. This will especially not work for those of us living in extremely far-off places like the west coast or the Midwest.

            Furthermore, the polls on what the plan for the spring semester should look like were released on the Dickinsonian. Of all the options, the plan that was selected was the least voted for. Even going all remote once again had almost three times the amount of votes than the current plan has. Ten people voted for this plan.

            Finally, when we look at the other schools all across the nation, we see schools ten, twelve, twenty times our size going back fully in person. Penn State, our neighboring school, plans to send thirty thousand of its students back to campus for the spring semester. Virginia Tech has sent around twenty thousand of its students back with little problems. What are we, an institution with less than three thousand students, doing this for?

            So many of us have watched our friends go off to other schools and (while respecting COVID guidelines) have at least a semblance of the college experience. After reading this, many of us are now looking around at the four walls that have been our college experience up until this point and considering joining our friends elsewhere. Another semester of online school is simply not feasible for most of us. This plan does not offer us a viable alternative.

What is Dickinson if not exceptional? Over the college application process, we freshmen both on tours and in interviews were given a view of Dickinson that we fell in love with: a school with a revolutionary spirit nestled in a beautiful small town in the mountains. We love Dickinson, but we can’t love Dickinson from our bedrooms, looking at our professors’ backgrounds and writing out paper after paper after paper.

What we ask of you is this: Please reconsider your decision. As a student body, we pledge to stick rigidly to any COVID guidelines. We pledge to do anything it takes to keep both eachother, the faculty, and the surrounding community as safe as we can all be. We pledge to not misuse your trust in us. All we ask of you is to take into consideration what this plan means for many of us and act accordingly.