If New York City weren’t the national epicenter for COVID-19, then on May 19th, graduating New York University students would have thronged to Grad Alley: a pre-graduation tradition of eating, drinking, and watching performances at the NYU campus right off Washington Square Park. I would have been among them. The day after, I was set to graduate from the NYU Game Center’s MFA program in game design. But like a lot of NYU students, I was no longer in New York City. In March, I’d gone back to my home state of Virginia during spring break, then gotten stuck when Virginia went on lockdown. I hadn’t seen my grad cohort in person for two months. From March to May, I developed my solo thesis project in isolation, with only my partner and the robins nesting in the backyard for in-person company.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/dyzv5v/nyu-grad-alley-vr-encapsualted-bad-covid-response