A blog post written by Erik Ohlrogge, a 2021-2023 Fellow
The last two years of the COVID-19 pandemic made me appreciate the convenience of working from home. They also made me value connecting with others in-person much more.
I think of myself as an I’m an introvert who masquerades as an extrovert. I’m perfectly content retreating behind a book or going for a long bike ride alone. It may be a biproduct of me being an only child—I don’t really know. It’s who I am, though.
The last two years of the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered in-person life for me like many others. Gatherings with friends became drinks over Zoom. Happy birthdays were sung over the phone. Group bike rides became solitary affairs. I went home to live with my parents and ride out the pandemic as we retreated to opposite ends of the house to not get on each other’s nerves. I was and am lucky. I had stable internet. I could work from home. I had space outside to bike. I could go back to a house that was large enough to retreat to opposite ends in. No one in my family died from COVID-19.
Prior to becoming a Wisconsin Population Health Service Fellow, I worked for Wisconsin’s COVID-19 response where my only in-person interaction at work was picking up my laptop when I started. While working at the DHS, I became familiar with the challenges of maintaining engagement over Zoom and trying to develop a shared team atmosphere. On one hand, I was part of a larger team working toward a common goal to minimize the impacts of the pandemic. On the other hand, I worked alone at home, and I never met a member of the team that I was a part of in-person. It was strange. I was part of a whole, but at the same time, I didn’t feel like it.
Surprisingly to me, I missed masquerading as an extrovert. I missed the chatting before a meeting, the networking, and the ease at learning about other people’s lives. I realized how hard it was for me to build genuine connections over video calls, and how I struggled to relate to people in a Zoom meeting in the same way that I can in-person. Maybe I am more of an extrovert than I realized.
Almost a year ago, I started the Wisconsin Population Health Service Fellowship at a time of optimism about the pandemic. People were being vaccinated. Cases were down. I started worked at my placement site in an office. Plans were made to have meetings and conferences in-person again. I got to meet my new colleagues and the other fellows in-person. The community building around in-person learning community meetings was something that I looked forward to going into the fellowship. The world seemed like it was taking its first steps back to “normalcy.”
Then came Delta and Omicron, and life slid into a strange limbo. Masks stayed on. In-person meetings were moved back to virtual. And eventually, my placement site moved back to working from home until the pandemic ebbed again.
Over the last few months, things have, again, begun to return to in-person. A couple weeks ago, the Fellowship Community had its first in-person learning community meeting in almost a year. It felt good to be in person with others. I had a feeling of connectedness that sitting in front of a computer screen during a Zoom meeting cannot fully replicate. The meeting also felt more memorable and not like an additional Zoom meeting in a week of Zoom meetings. Similarly, I attended the 2022 Wisconsin Public Health Association meeting, and just being at the conference with others was meaningful. It’s a special thing to be able to sit in the same room with others, and it’s amazing what getting a bunch of brains physically in the same room can accomplish. All this even despite uncertainty of having a meeting during a pandemic and navigating the awkwardness of understanding whether to shake hands or to bump elbows. What made it fun is understanding that we are all navigating this ongoing strangeness together.
Don’t get me wrong—there are many parts of the remote world that I love and which I think should be carried forward. However, I now have a more powerful appreciation for what is like to be in-person. The COVID-19 pandemic brought many changes to the world. I hope that some of these changes stick, and I hope that some of the changes help us recognize the importance of connectedness and community.