Even though the COVID-19 pandemic impacted virtually everyone, if you ask 65 different people about their experiences, you’ll hear 65 different stories. 

That’s especially true on the Colorado State University campus, where students grappled with everything from the challenges associated with remote learning to anxiety about their families’ health to discovering what it means to be an adult in a changing world. That’s why a team of CSU historians sought to capture these experiences for Ram Stories, an oral history project that preserves interviews with 65 students who offered firsthand accounts of what happened in their lives during the year 2020 and beyond. 

“Overall, I found the students had extraordinary resilience – it’s really hard to grow up when you’re doing it in front of a computer with no one around,” said Ruth M. Alexander, a history professor and primary investigator for the project. 

While other organizations and institutions have created oral histories for a variety of communities, Alexander said CSU is the only university she’s aware of that is doing a project centered around the student experience. 

This project is a collaboration between the CSU Libraries and CSU Public and Environmental History Center. It received funding from the CSU President’s Office, and the hope is that the lessons learned from the student interviews can shape policy as universities prepare for future pandemics and other disruptive events. 

“This project is an actual manifestation of primary sources to back up some of the broader claims and generalizations you heard during the pandemic,” said Jade Felthoven, the student intern who conducted many of the interviews. “It’s one thing to assume that remote learning can be difficult, but it’s quite another to hear someone explain why in their own words.” 

Interactive Ram Stories map highlights student experiences during COVID-19 

To showcase the student interviews, Felthoven and Josh Reyling,who leads the Geospatial Centroid Help Desk, created an interactive story map that includes audio recordings and a full transcript of each conversation. The goal was to speak to students from a variety of majors and backgrounds. 

This included international students, as well as a student who was studying abroad in New Zealand just as the worldwide lockdowns began. Other stories include a student who discovered their gender identity during lockdown, as well as another who learned lessons about what her race meant to her amid the George Floyd protests in summer 2020.

“The students talked really eloquently about what they went through, and the ways they knew everyone else around them was going through similar – but also profoundly different – experiences,” said Mark Shelstad, the head of digital and archive services for the CSU Libraries. 

Despite their challenges, the Ram Stories team said students were largely complimentary toward CSU’s COVID-19 response, as well as hopeful about what is to come. 

“A lot of people mourned lost experiences,” Felthoven said. “But I’d say holistically, they were still positive and optimistic.” 

For the next phase of the project, Alexander is interviewing high-level CSU administrators who played key roles in responding to the pandemic at CSU and research scientists who pursued innovations in masking, testing and vaccine development, facilitating recovery from the pandemic at CSU while making critical contributions to global infectious disease knowledge and technologies. 

“This COVID project is probably the most meaningful oral history project I’ve led,”  Alexander said. “To hear how young people from 18-22 got themselves through such a unique period in time really sheds light on what they’re capable of, and can hopefully help inform administrators about what kind of support they’ll need in the future.”