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When I think back to my happiest
memories,

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very very few of them were spent totally
by myself.

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I have had the opportunity to meet some
of the best friends I'm ever gonna

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have in my life.

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My time at UVA has been
revolving around social experiences, it's

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about people that I met and
fun stuff that we did together.

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I remember one night,
my salsa group and I, instead of

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practicing a dance which we'd been
spending hours on all semester,

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we decided instead just to turn on some
music and improvise.

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We ended up spending hours that night
dancing the night away.

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I remember one time my friends and I
during finals

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got a booth and we just spent hours and
hours just studying there

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and in order to like commemorate the
moment we walked into 1515,

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went to the photo booth and just took a
picture.

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I remember I was approached by a

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guy in my class who said he had just
gotten his pilot's license, so I met up

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with him and two other strangers
and we just flew around Central Virginia

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that same day that he asked me.
It was kind of just this spontaneous,

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spur-of-the-moment experience.
I put way more value into that memory

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now than i did
before the coronavirus started just

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because something like that is just so
unimaginable today.

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Thinking of those memories, it inspires
hope in people and without hope we can't

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go anywhere.

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Every student is feeling the exact same

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way, everybody's missing out on the same
exact things, but

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working together as a group, as a
community hopefully,

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those memories that we've missed out on,
those will come back.

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There's not one big

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thing we can all do.
It's a lot of little things that are

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gonna add up. It's
sitting a little bit farther away on the

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Lawn from your friends.
It's not sharing a drink, it's not sharing

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your lunch.

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Moving forward, we just have to focus on

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the things we can do. We can wear masks,
we can separate ourselves.

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I can't say we're gonna be in the
football stadium 30 thousand people this

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year, I can't say that but I can say
I can care about the person next to me.

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I have the power to do that.

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Every single day we don't know what's

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going to come next. We don't know how
this is gonna end, when this is gonna

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to end,
but we do know that it's gonna change.

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I obviously want to create more happy
moments in my life.

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And so, really all I can do is look
forward to having more of these moments

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in the future.

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We hold on to hope because hope is the

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one thing
that keeps us going when we can't see

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what's on the other side.
If we can do this right we can be the

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hope
for education that we can come back

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and be safe and keep others safe. We have
the opportunity to give

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the country some hope.

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