By Cole Tompkins | Photographer

Socially distanced classrooms are the one good thing to come out of this pandemic. Gone are the days of me rubbing elbows with two people while trying to take notes and pay attention to a lecture. In all of my classes now I have a minimum of two open seats in either direction which is perfect, it leaves me a seat to drop my bag into and is still close enough to lean over and ask my neighbor a question if I missed what the professor said.

On top of the extra space, now there’s fewer people in the room as well. This is especially nice in classes like my intro to astronomy. Instead of the normal 300 people in the lecture, it is now limited to 70 people for an auditorium meant for more than double that. This allows us all to spread out and reduces traffic getting in and out of the class and building.

In fact, I have noticed with fewer people on campus at a time I’ve been getting to all my classes around five minutes earlier than I have in semesters past. This has been a nice perk as I’ve enjoyed time to grab a brief snack or just take a casual stroll to class rather than keep up a brisk walk to get from Carroll Science to Foster.

Now don’t get me wrong, I would go back to having cramped lecture halls and mad dashes to class in an instant if it meant we could go back to “normal.” I dearly miss having all of my friends crammed into a car on a late-night Whataburger run and the packed sports arenas. This is simply one of the small silver linings I’ve been able to find in this pandemic.