As colleges across the country grapple with how to respond to COVID-19, Vanderbilt University is taking a bold step. All undergraduate students living in dorms have been instructed to pack up and move out by the end of the week.

That will be a bit complicated for senior Jack Rong. He’s flying home to Beijing and says he’ll have to go into isolation in his apartment for two weeks when he gets back.

Even finding a way home has been difficult. Since many flights make stops on the way to Beijing, Rong had to book his ticket through a Chinese airline so he wouldn’t pass through any outbreak hotspots along the way.

But Rong — who’s wearing a mask — is glad the university is shutting down.

“Measures should be taken earlier, rather than taking them after we see that there are people testing positive for this virus,” Rong says. He says students are less aware of the threat than they should be.

“After the school has told us to stop social gatherings and stuff, people are still, I guess, just hanging out together,” Rong says. “That’s not something that you should be doing while this virus is going crazy in the community.”

‘There’s A Lot Of Sadness’

Sophomore Madeline Roche is struggling a bit more with the balance between supporting other students and staying healthy. Roche is a resident assistant in a freshman dorm and says the students in her building are feeling stressed.

“There’s a lot of sadness. There’s a lot of grief of thinking that they had another month of living together and not really realizing that they saw some of their friends for the last time until August,” she says.

“There has just been a really somber attitude on campus of knowing that the threat is really real and wanting to take it seriously, and also feeling like we’re missing out on so much.”

Plus, there’s the question of how to keep up with classwork from afar. Like a growing number of universitites, Vanderbilt plans to hold classes online for the rest of the semester, starting Monday.

Roche says she and other students who live in the Chicago area hope to meet up at a coffee shop to study together, once they’re back home. But she’s not sure about the logistics of online learning.

“One of my professors tested the system this morning, and it was really — I was surprised how different it felt. Because as he was talking, I was nodding my head and all of the things that I would do normally, just in the middle of a class,” Roche says. “And I realized he was getting no feedback. He couldn’t see us at all. He was just talking to a camera.”

Keeping Up From Afar

Junior Justin Forstmann says most of his classes are reading and discussion based, so he thinks the coursework should be easy enough to complete remotely.

But Forstmann says his friends studying the sciences will have a harder time. His roommate, for instance, is studying for the Medical College Admission Test, and now doesn’t know when he’ll be able to take the exam.

“We’ll just play it by ear. We really don’t know yet,” he says. “I think people are aware that their grades are definitely going to be different than most semesters.”

Forstmann is also worried he be tempted to procrastinate more at home.

“It’s just gonna be very different doing college work not on campus,” he says. “But hopefully I’ll able to focus.”

Samantha Max is a Report for America corps member.