When I think back to my happiest memories,
very very few of them were spent totally by myself.
I have had the opportunity to meet some of the best friends I'm ever gonna
have in my life.
My time at UVA has been revolving around social experiences, it's
about people that I met and fun stuff that we did together.
I remember one night, my salsa group and I, instead of
practicing a dance which we'd been spending hours on all semester,
we decided instead just to turn on some music and improvise.
We ended up spending hours that night dancing the night away.
I remember one time my friends and I during finals
got a booth and we just spent hours and hours just studying there
and in order to like commemorate the moment we walked into 1515,
went to the photo booth and just took a picture.
I remember I was approached by a
guy in my class who said he had just gotten his pilot's license, so I met up
with him and two other strangers and we just flew around Central Virginia
that same day that he asked me. It was kind of just this spontaneous,
spur-of-the-moment experience. I put way more value into that memory
now than i did before the coronavirus started just
because something like that is just so unimaginable today.
Thinking of those memories, it inspires hope in people and without hope we can't
go anywhere.
Every student is feeling the exact same
way, everybody's missing out on the same exact things, but
working together as a group, as a community hopefully,
those memories that we've missed out on, those will come back.
There's not one big
thing we can all do. It's a lot of little things that are
gonna add up. It's sitting a little bit farther away on the
Lawn from your friends. It's not sharing a drink, it's not sharing
your lunch.
Moving forward, we just have to focus on
the things we can do. We can wear masks, we can separate ourselves.
I can't say we're gonna be in the football stadium 30 thousand people this
year, I can't say that but I can say I can care about the person next to me.
I have the power to do that.
Every single day we don't know what's
going to come next. We don't know how this is gonna end, when this is gonna
to end, but we do know that it's gonna change.
I obviously want to create more happy moments in my life.
And so, really all I can do is look forward to having more of these moments
in the future.
We hold on to hope because hope is the
one thing that keeps us going when we can't see
what's on the other side. If we can do this right we can be the
hope for education that we can come back
and be safe and keep others safe. We have the opportunity to give
the country some hope.
[MUSIC PLAYING]