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A team of Colorado State University researchers will spend the next academic year interviewing 200 students and recent graduates to get first-hand accounts of what it was like to be in college during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The project provides an opportunity to collectively share our experiences, to grieve, and to provide an opportunity to discuss the pandemic and its continuing impact on our daily lives,” said Mark Shelstad, head of digital and archival services at CSU Libraries.
The project is called Ram Stories and the result will be an oral history of the COVID-19 pandemic that will be publicly accessible through an interactive story map, podcasts and TV shorts. Oral history recordings and transcriptions will be permanently collected in the Morgan Library Archives. Ram Stories is funded by the CSU President’s Office, and the hope is that by documenting the student experience, the university will deepen its understanding of student needs and help it better prepare for its next big challenge.
CSU History Professor Emerita Ruth Alexander is the principal investigator for Ram Stories. Ariel Schnee of the Center for Public Lands History is the project manager. They hired two undergraduates and one graduate student to conduct the interviews.
“The interviews will last 20 to 25 minutes, and the ones we’ve done so far have been incredibly rich,” Alexander said. “Students have a lot to say, and we’re learning that the pandemic has deeply affected them during a formative time in their lives.”
The team recruits a diverse range of students to participate in the project to ensure the interviews present a wide range of experiences and perspectives. Ram Stories seeks participants from all majors as well as diverse local, ethnic and racial identities. The hope is also to tell the stories of students who identify as LGBTQIA+, those from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, and who come from a wide variety of faiths and cultural communities.
The team said they have already heard deeply moving stories during the pilot interview process. A schoolgirl lost her grandmother to COVID-19 early in the pandemic, but was unable to attend her funeral at home in Mexico due to travel restrictions.
Another student said the social isolation of COVID-19, combined with the Black Lives Matter movement that followed the 2020 killing of George Floyd, prompted her to think carefully about her voting identity and deepen her ties to the African-American community. .
And a Brazilian student explained that it took months of constant effort to obtain a visa to enter the United States for graduate studies at CSU. In the fall of 2020, he struggled with virtual participation in graduate seminars and worried that his pursuit of higher education in the U.S. conflicted with the responsibilities of his multigenerational household, including his mother, a nurse who worked on the front lines in hospital caring for patients with COVID-19.
“Every story I’ve heard so far is different, and it’s so interesting to learn about these stories from different perspectives,” said Nick Taylor, one of the graduate students conducting the interviews.
The Ram Stories team is recruiting students for the project throughout the 2022-23 academic year. The team will ask questions that invite students to reflect on the impact of the pandemic on their academic engagement; personal family and community relationships; professional goals; and mental and emotional health.
Students who are interviewed should be aware that the researchers for this project are not mental health professionals and the team cannot offer therapeutic services for ongoing challenges or trauma. The Ram Stories team urges any student in need of therapeutic intervention related to the mental and emotional challenges of COVID-19 to reach out to available experts at CSU and in the greater community. Please use this link for additional information: health.colostate.edu/mhwb-resources.
To learn more about how to participate in Ram Stories, visit lib.colostate.edu/ram-stories.
“I sit in on these interviews and I’m really blown away by the resilience, eloquence and thoughtfulness of our students,” Alexander said. “The students involved in this project are the creators of an extremely important historical record, and I am grateful to each and every one of them for sharing their stories and deepening our understanding of the pandemic and its impact.”
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