Southwestern Magazine | Spring 2021

1 2 | SOUTHWE S T E RN Timourian shifted the program from Pirate Training to Pirate Quest, a virtual scavenger hunt through an app. Teams of four or five students used Google Earth to explore Georgetown and find landmarks such as the Monument Cafe or completed tasks on video, like a trick- shot challenge in which, as Timourian describes, “they would drop stuff out of the third floor of Mabee and catch it in a trash can on the ground.” Other events were reimagined. For the Annual Greek Chili Cook-Off, instead of squeezing students into Bishops’ Lounge, students created cooking videos in their residence halls and apartments, and judges critiqued the videos instead of sampling the chili. Student Activities also hosted a virtual escape room, a Super Smash Bros. tournament, and a painting event in which students picked up supplies and made art in their dorms. “We’re just trying to remind the students that this, too, shall pass eventually. . . . It’s easier for the older gener- ation to see this as a transient period that we will get through,” says Timourian, who has worked at South- western for 28 years. A CULTURE OF CARE Once students arrived, the Health Center continued rigorous testing, each week selecting 50 people randomly from the students, faculty, and staff and screening them at the PATCH. When Southwestern eventually had outbreaks of COVID-19, the preparation and teamwork among the staff ensured that the quarantine and contact-tracing process went smoothly. If a student chose to quarantine on campus, they would move into a room in the Lord Center or Brown–Cody Hall, where each bedroom had a separate ventilation system and bathroom, to isolate for 14 days. The custodial team would immediately decontaminate their room. While in isolation, they would get meals delivered and their trash picked up, and if they ran out of clothes, Athletics staff would wash their laundry. The care coordinators, such as Xan Koonce '05, who regularly works as the associate director of university events, would contact the student who tested positive and interview them, determining if they were symptomatic and building a list of who they were in close contact with. The care coordinators would then give this list to the contact tracers, who would ask those people another set of questions and alert them that they needed to quarantine. “There were several moments that it was intense,” Koonce shares. “There were times where they had a lot of close contacts, several times where we had to quarantine a fraternity house . . . . There’s a lot at stake when you’re trying to keep a pandemic at bay.” Koonce, like many others during the pandemic, is doubling up on her professional duties. On top of contact tracing, as an event planner, she’s organizing two socially distanced commencement ceremonies on the same day at the end of the spring semester: one for the class of 2020 and one for the class of 2021. The university’s health and safety protocols continue as the crisis wears on. When discussing the pandemic that has irreversibly changed everyone’s life, it’s hard to keep positive. A dose of cynicism seems like a self-defense mechanism. But this isn’t the case when speaking with Southwestern staff members, some of whom contrib- uted to this article while quarantined after a close encounter with the coronavirus. Many staff members have been going into the office just as much as they did before the pandemic, risking themselves because they believe in providing a safe environment for the education of Southwestern students. But no one takes all the credit. Instead, they divide it among their hardworking teams and their colleagues in other departments whom they’ve gotten to know better, connecting to each other even in this dark time and proving that when everyone works together, they can overcome even the most difficult of challenges.