Unpredictability defines the 2020-21 school year at Peddie. Students are attending the school in various ways: as boarders, day students and remote students. Even for day students, commuting to campus this year is far from usual as there are alternating online and in-person weeks. 

Harrison (Harry) Hall ’22 is a boarder from Rochester, New York. “The beginning of this year has been far from normal for me,” said Hall, “I had to arrive a week earlier than usual and even get tested for Covid immediately after arriving on campus. To be honest, I was scared I would test positive and felt relieved when the results indicated I was negative.”

Hall is a member of the Peddie swim team and notes how the team this year is drastically different from those of past seasons. “Before classes started, we had to train in the lake, but now we train in the pool. Now, it feels strange that many members of the swim team are remote, but I feel like the swim team is definitely taking careful precautions,” said Hall. Such precautions include wearing a mask all the way to the deck and having two or three people per lane instead of the usual five or six. Additionally, only every other lane is occupied.

Boarding life has also been rather unusual for Hall. His roommate, Daniel Sung ’22, is attending remotely from Korea, so Hall is in a single room for at least the fall trimester. “Though I know that picking up lunch to eat in my room to maintain social distance and having to do daily temperature and symptom checks is rather tedious, I do realize it is for the wellbeing of the school” said Hall. “I just hope this rather chaotic pandemic ends soon so that school life can get back to normal, and we can have all members of the Peddie community back on campus.” 

Hall says that he has more free time than before the pandemic, especially due to long passing periods and a two hour lunch block. Apart from attending school classes, Hall says that his life in the dorm is rather similar to his summer, when he swam and prepared for the SAT.