Like most college students on any normal Friday night, I was looking forward to waking up the next day at noon, not getting out of bed until 1 p.m., and spending the whole day staring at my assignments to maybe get an hour of work done. On Saturday, Oct. 17, however, what had promised to be a normal Saturday at Hamilton very quickly proved to be everything but that. When I woke up at 10:30 that morning to many of my neighbors in Major Hall having a very animate conversation in the hallway involving words and phrases like “quarantine”, “contact-tracing”, and “Campo”, I jumped out of bed with the explosiveness of a warmed-up long jumper, put on my mask, and interrupted their conversation with a slightly-less family friendly version of “what’s happening?”. People don’t normally throw around words like that before noon on a weekend unless something serious is happening.

And of course, something serious did indeed happen. A beloved member of our floor/cohort tested positive for coronavirus, and since we all are so tight-knit and often do homework or eat meals with each other (while following guidelines), this person had to identify our entire cohort as close contacts. Before I continue, I must say that as someone who lives a few doors away from this person, they are one of the most responsible people I know, and I know I am not alone in saying that they would be someone no one would expect to contract coronavirus, or at least to do so by violating Hamilton’s safety guidelines. While me and my roommate asked ourselves, “How could our friend be the person to get it?”, we knew we had very little time to pack up before we would get picked up for quarantine.

As we mused over how long we would be in quarantine for, where they would bring us, and if we would still be living together, my roommate received a call from the Health Center (I very quickly learned as a Hamiltonian that T-Mobile, my cell provider, does not hold service well on the Dark Side) that answered our questions. We would be in quarantine for 14 days at least, by ourselves, off-campus at Homewood Suites in New Hartford. We would get Grubhub gift cards courtesy of Hamilton to feed ourselves, and asides from opening our doors to pick up our food as the hotel workers rampantly escape our six-feet radius of transmission after dropping it off, we were to be inside our rooms at all times for two weeks.

After an amusing van ride with a Campus Safety worker who was surprisingly unafraid of me and my roommate (it turns out that he had already been sick with the virus before) and a last minute switch of rooms because of a door that just wouldn’t open, my quarantine had officially begun. Two weeks, by myself, in one (pretty nice) hotel room.

I honestly thought quarantine would be a lot worse. My fellow quarantined friends describe their experiences as “restless”, “repetitive”, “sluggish”, and even “hungry”, which I thought was the funniest response. Even the two-day quarantine every student needed to undergo before being allowed out of their dorm buildings was more annoying, in my experience. Yet, with schoolwork, pretty good food options to choose from (my current first place winner is the Carne Asada from Chipotle, but I had a friend order filet mignon from a steakhouse on Sunday night), a whole Sunday being spent doing a Computer Science project, and fairly good health, quarantine has proven to be not so bad, at least for now. Besides the part where my window doesn’t open or that I can’t see another human being for two weeks, I personally find that there’s not much to complain about given the circumstances. Although, I wish I could see how quiet my hallway in Major is given that not one person remains, or the public outcry over Commons’ entrance and exit changes. I’ll surely forget about that and spend an embarrassing amount of time in front of the wrong door. What I won’t forget, however, is the taste of a warmed-up chocolate chip cookie from Cafe Opus, something I had begun to indulge in far too often. And to be honest, that very well could be what I’m looking forward to most when I get back on the Hill in 11 days.