With the country currently quarantined due to the Covid-19 pandemic, it can be easy for many to get overwhelmed and suffer mentally and health wise. Yet, despite—or perhaps because of—the anxiety, panic, and fear most are grappling with, students have been driven to create.

Students have been spending more time at home than they typically would to stay safe.  The last 9 months have practically been all indoors. This begs the question, how creative have students gotten? Creativity is thought to be difficult in isolation due to the lack of inspiration, but Don Lugo’s freshman has proved this to be false. With a total of 20 first-years responding to the survey, 4 in every 5 students said that they have gotten more creative in quarantine!

Answers to the survey on what sort of innovative ideas they had come up with included embroidery/painting on clothing, sculpting with clay, reading, writing for enjoyment, and playing board games with their families. “My mom has been helping me and my stepsister with lots of things, like redoing our rooms. She told us to brainstorm ideas of how we wanted to make it look, and I like to think I was very creative with how I decided to decorate,” Kadie Fordyce says. This also applied to many others, for example, Sierra Gonzalez says she has been creative by putting stickers on practically everything she owns to personalize it and painting her closet out of boredom.

Students involved seemed to collectively agree that although they did not like being inside, it gave them time to work on themselves and get closer with their families. An anonymous student shared that she was able to, “Become closer to my brother and his wife and it gave me a chance to be my true self and to come out to my siblings.” Madison Good was also able to bond with her family creatively, saying, “Yeah, I feel closer [to my family]. Being in quarantine with them is kinda nice; we get to spend lots of time together and just make things. I even got my brother to paint with me a few times.”

The article “Creativity in the times of coronavirus: Here’s how creative outlets helped Shakespeare, Newton and now, you, amid pandemic” agrees that quarantine appears to be good for sparking creativity. They compared people’s current situation at home to famous inventive creators in the past. They say, “Mathematician and physicist Sir Isaac Newton’s work in the late 1660s while he was quarantined at home on account of the bubonic plague, is considered to be his best, including discovering differential and integral calculus, formulating a theory of universal gravitation, and explored optics, experimenting with prisms and investigating light,” Although comparing freshman students and famous scientists may be a little extreme, it appears that when stuck in one place people tend to become more creative, as Don Lugos students displayed!