It was just days ago that I woke up, looked outside, and a smile was brought to my face by new small red blooms on the tree beyond my window. The sights and sounds of spring on campus are unparalleled by any other time of year. I spend my college months looking forward to long days with sunsets over the skyline and frisbees flying overhead on the upper quad. However, due to interruptive construction, the euphoria of spring time at St. Thomas has been drastically inhibited.

These days, I wake up every morning to sounds like a war zone, in preparation for the St. Thomas chapel expansion project. Days ago I might have been able to appreciate pine and oak and now instead, I see trees, too wide in diameter to hug, lying on the exposed ground. Dirt and dead grass cover the area that is now fenced off outside the chapel on the upper quad. The trees that now lay in a pile on the ground used to have blooms and branches that touched my window. Does St. Thomas plan to replace the natural processes that were uprooted with the trees? If we claim to be a sustainable community, we must take responsibility for our environmental impact and ensure we are not doing more damage. It is clear the trees were there for a long time. They were tall, thick and healthy. Some trees even had metal tags and markers for what must have been an outdoor laboratory at some point. I hope to see more information about what our leaders plan to do to make up for the lost trees.

The construction workers arrive on site before my alarm goes off. When I awake early, I attempt to work on homework or mediate — neither of which I can do anymore due to the noise. So, while we are college students grasping to nearly nonexistent threads of mental and physical health, my ability to properly sleep and study are severely inhibited in what is supposed to be my home. The first-year students on my floor are encouraged to stay on campus during the weekends. St. Thomas does not want to be known as a suitcase school. Because a large majority of our students are from the surrounding metro area, some stay on campus during the week for class and leave on the weekend. However, when our every waking hour is plagued by disturbing noise, I do not see more students choosing to stay on campus and participate in community building, leaving our out-of-state students alone with the noise.

Not only is the noise early, it is nonstop. I hear sawing and crashing, wood cracking and concrete crumpling. Though it may sound insignificant, I no longer spend excess time in my room when I can help it because I am unsettled and frankly, afraid. The loud noises scare me and do not make me feel comfortable in my own home. I began to imagine how this may have been worse if I had some sort of life trauma that exposed me to loud noises. What about our students who are veterans? Or those who grew up in a neighborhood where gunshots were regular signs of danger? What does this unexpected construction project mean for our already marginalized student populations with traumatic stress? Without a prior warning of when the project would begin, we were blindsided by these noises. Increased anxiety, fear, annoyance, and frustration have left a funk in our dorm community, 130 women in John Paul II who feel excluded and not cared for. Had we known the start date of the project we would have been able to plan ahead and not be taken by surprise.

I walked by the blacked out chain-link fence this morning, thrown off my usual route to class. At the point where I usually look up and enjoy the sunrise and the beautiful pines, something was missing. Not just the trees or the quad space, but a sense of familiarity and belonging.

JPII stands at the northernmost corner of campus, already distanced from the heart of St. Thomas. Not only are we far away, we now have a blocked off area of what used to be the space we used for community building. In this fenced off area there used to be a set of trees used for hammocking, several picnic tables, and enough grass for our community to come together in the first days of spring.

If you asked any student when the most lively time of the year is on our campus, I believe they would say the first warm days. People tan, play frisbee, do homework, listen to music and generally have a good time on the upper quad. Now, a large portion of the space we used to have to enjoy a well-deserved Minnesota spring is gone. In fact, from our building, one cannot even see out the front and observe the goings-on of our campus community. Sun, students, and nature are great sources of joy for me this time of year. It is detrimental to my mental health to look out and see a tarped, chain-link fence instead of where I used to be able to see frolicking and leisure. This ultimately culminates in a feeling of exclusion. JPII is physically separated from the rest of campus, and it feels as though we are being pushed out.

It makes me not want to live in my own home, and that says a lot, because I am a resident advisor in JPII. I chose to live in this hall and specifically pursued this building for the community. After a positive experience in my first year on campus making friends and building community within JPII, I came back to give back. I wanted to use this space of community to create a positive experience for my first year residents, and now my ability to do so is greatly diminished.

I understand that construction at a growing university is necessary. However, when such a large and impactful project is to be erected, I would expect some compassion for those of us who are here now. It is hypocritical for an institution to state that one of their core convictions is personal attention when they did not have enough empathy to warn us about the start date and details of the project and not offer opportunities for any student input. As a graduate of the class of 2020, I will not see the fruits of this labor. I will leave with the sour taste of dirt and dead trees in my mouth.

I do not write this letter to whine with entitlement. I intend to raise my voice, informed by my building community. Because no one asked us to share that we are affected, I feel it is necessary to share the way this project is impacting us, even if our leaders will not change their course. Hopefully, the residence life team and those who make decisions on such momentous projects will learn from the negative effects on our students and better approach this issue in the future.

In the future, I hope that our leaders will act with more compassion for students, care for the environment, and think of the community.

Bizzy Stephenson can be reached at step4026@stthomas.edu.