“I think [COVID] negatively [impacted us] because I know a lot of people didn’t have to do that much work during COVID and it kind of harmed them in the years after,” Leah Shults (’27) said.

“When I was a kid we didn’t use technology as much [but now, after COVID] we use it to do school work…and to increase learning opportunities…more than ever before,” Kristen Kong (’28) said.

“Social media has an impact [because when you] spend a lot of time on TikTok, you lose the time you would’ve spent being bored, which means you lose out on coming up with ideas,” Madalyn Burke (’26) said. “It takes away from the time you spend with yourself.” 

“I sort of worry about the implementation of AI and [how] that’s going to affect people…and how education is going to look,” Brooks Maiden (’27) said. “People [are already] using it for emotional support and supplementing it for real life interaction with humans.”

“I’ve been doing more coding classes because of expanding technology and AI and [the growing number of] tech related jobs,” Kong said.  

“I had a situation with my friend where a member of [their] family had gotten deported because of [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and they were] saying he had invalid papers, but we still don’t know if that is the truth,” Iris McCullough (’27) said.

“[ICE] really just shows that people are cruel [and] life’s not fair,” Teagan Sorrell (’27) said.

“It’s made me think a lot more about how our government is doing,” Emma Lavery (’28) said. “People come to America for help and we’re not [helping them]. America isn’t doing that.”