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Cheyenne Braganza has an entire floor to herself in her dorm building at the University of Vermont.

Her roommate is home in Massachusetts, gone with almost all 10,000-plus UVM undergraduates. The Burlington school told them in mid-March to stay away after spring break rather than return and risk spreading the COVID-19 virus.

Cheyenne Braganza, a sophomore at the University of Vermont, is a native of Kenya. She is among a handful of students remaining on the Burlington campus that stopped hosting in-person classes in mid-March.(Photo: COURTESY)

Braganza is among about 140 international students who, because of COVID-19-related travel complications, remain on campus. She has plenty of peace and quiet in her suite as she and students on-campus and at home continue their studies online in the last few days of final exams.

The solitude is great for doing school work, said the native of Nairobi, Kenya. The sophomore studying molecular genetics has a bathroom to herself, a glorious feeling for a college student. She can play music as loud as she wants.

But its isolating.

It gets lonely because I finished my work for the day and theres not much to do, said Braganza, who turns 21 in June. Her boyfriend, mother, father and brother are seven time zones away in Kenya. She talks with them on the phone during the day, but at night when her school work is done, her loved ones back home have gone to bed and the campus is forest-quiet Braganza feels forsaken.

Cheyenne Braganza of Nairobi, Kenya, says she gets a lot of work done but often feels lonely as one of only a few students remaining on campus at the University of Vermont.(Photo: COURTESY)

She finds comfort in socially-distant interactions with dining-hall workers and students she sees on meal runs. She takes solace in her work, which includes watching videos of scientists performing lab work before calculating data derived from that to write her own reports.

Braganzas career goals are timely. She dreams of doing medical research and running her own lab.

I dont want to treat patients. I want to do more-groundbreaking work, like research on vaccines, she said. Ive always had a passion for research.

More personal stories: How Vermonters are facing life in the coronavirus era

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A floor to herself: UVM international student remains on campus - Burlington Free Press

This entry was posted on May 8, 2020 at 12:51 am and is filed under Molecular Genetics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |