A Drug Named Desire: A Pharmacology Master Student's Tale of Life and Service in New Orleans

If you spend 10 minutes watching the news you're likely to hear someone mention the phrase "the new normal" in reference to the guidelines on social distancing and conduct during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, for me and I'm sure many others, life right now feels far from normal. It simultaneously feels like an eternity and just yesterday that my classmates and I were still attending live lectures and seminars. The first couple of weeks being under stay-at-home orders and virtual classrooms honestly didn't feel too different. The academic aspects of being a student, while different, were not completely upended. I attended online lectures, studied for exams, and continued working on my thesis. After the first couple of weeks, I really began to feel the changes to my everyday life in the social aspects of being a student. The absence of things that seem truly minor like chatting with someone before or after class became significant. Being unable to truly engage in

March has brought tremendous change to the lives of everyone across the globe with the spread of SARS-COV-2. With the implementation of social distancing, many universities across the U.S. have forgone in-person lectures and shifted to online instruction. When Tulane adopted this measure in early March, I was proud that the university took swift action to prevent the spread of SARS-COV-2 within the Tulane community. This shift brought many adjustments to the remainder of our semester. First, all of our instruction was shifted online through Zoom. I was nervous about how this shift to online learning would impact the quality of education professors would be able to provide. While Zoom classes are no replacement for in-person lectures, in my opinion, I have been surprised by the effectiveness of Zoom's ability to facilitate an online classroom and allow professors to give high-quality lectures. Second, all of our exams were also moved online. A consequence of this, one that I'm h