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Description
Bridget Ekis (she/her/hers) was born in Waterford, Michigan.At a young age, she bought her first camera and started photographing surroundings. Soon after, she had started working at Waterford Coney Island and she graduated from n Waterford Kettering High School in 2017. She then quickly moved to Chicago to attend Columbia College Chicago. When she moved back home due to the pandemic, she was unsure if she would continue attending Columbia in the fall and while livig at home, she attended community college. She came back to Chicago to attend Columbia and moved into her first apartment with a roommate and dog, and started a new job at Stepping Stones Nursery and Preschool in August, where she is now and is in her senior year of college at Columbia.
Publication Date
Fall 2020
Publisher
Columbia College Chicago
City
Chicago
Keywords
COVID-19, pandemic, Chicago, Illinois, United States, coronavirus
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities | Oral History | Public History | Social and Behavioral Sciences
Recommended Citation
Naruszewicz, Magdalena, "Interview with Bridget Ekis" (2020). Capturing Quarantine Oral Histories. 31.
https://digitalcommons.colum.edu/capturingquarantine/31
Comments
Bridget Ekis, a senior Photojournalism major at Columbia College Chicago, recalls her early years, highschool, college, prior to quarantine, and social distancing due to the COVID-19 outbreak and pandemic. She also describes her beginnings of photojournalism at a young age, experiences in highschool, and how photojournalism is outlined in college. Bridget elaborates on mental health as she is recalling events that happened in the past.
Bridget mentions how her initial reaction to COVID-19 and its effects on her living situation and those closest to her. She also speaks of her transitions of relocations and moving to online learning. Bridget speaks about the struggles she had during isolation as she is a person that missed mundane things like “stand[ing] on the Brown Line for 40 minutes, and be like, squashed like a sardine next to other people”.
Bridget shares how unemployment during the pandemic allowed her “to reevaluate [her] goals for the future and where she expects herself to be”. She also mentions how the pandemic made her live in the moment so much, and “almost too afraid to be ambitious, because [she] just don't know if it'll positively impact [her] mental health”.
Conducted in fall 2020 by an Oral History: The Art of the Interview student, this interview with a fellow student in the class reflects on the pandemic and how it impacted their life. The interview is conducted based on the life history approach to oral history.