The Class of 2020 Revisited

No Peddie class experienced a senior year quite like the Class of 2020.

COVID-19 upended everything. Prom was canceled. Commencement went virtual. The rites of passage that typically mark the end of high school simply … didn’t happen.

When I first spoke with Peddie’s senior class leaders — Luke Marolda, Julia Patella, Bateman Solms, Johnny Sussek and Dennis Zhang — it was the spring of 2020, and we met over Zoom because, well, there was no other option. They were scattered across their homes, finishing high school in isolation, trying to make sense of an ending that never really came.

Five years later, we met again — still on Zoom, but for very different reasons. Now, it was time zones and careers, spanning New York, Edinburgh and Copenhagen, that kept them in different places, not a global lockdown.

I looked for signs that five years had passed. The banter had shifted from homework and college aspirations to jobs and life after graduation. Some had grown facial hair. Others had shorter hair. But the biggest change wasn’t in their appearances. It was in their perspectives. The same thoughtfulness and resilience I had admired in 2020 were still there, now deepened by half a decade of life experience.

This is the story of the Class of 2020 — a reflection on the milestones they missed, the lessons they’ve learned, and how time has reshaped their perspective on that strange and uncertain spring.

Editor’s Note: Johnny Sussek was unavailable for this interview.

Editor: Have any of you had the chance to return to Peddie since graduating?

Luke: I play golf a lot at Peddie with Toby Bickford ’20 and some other friends I still keep in touch with. And I’m definitely going to reunion.

Julia: I’m living in Manhattan, and I’ve been commuting back home to New Jersey once a week because I’ve been called back to Peddie to choreograph their theater production this semester. It’s been really lovely connecting with current Peddie students and seeing the similarities in our experiences, having been a Peddie Theater kid.

Dennis: Even though I haven’t been back in person, there’s been a number of serendipitous ways that I keep coming into contact with Peddie folk, and it’s always a good time.

Bateman: I have not been in the States a whole lot since I started university, to be honest. I’ve mostly been staying over here in Scotland and working.

Editor: Looking back five years later, how do you feel about missing those pivotal high school milestones?

Bateman: It’s something that will always hurt a little bit. I remember a few weeks before it all happened, Dennis and I were touring prom venues. But I have a lot more sympathy looking back. No one knew what was going on. Everyone did their best with the situation at hand.

Julia: My perspective has certainly changed with time. I recently revisited that [Chronicle] article from 2020 and was struck by how sad we were and the sense of loss and sacrifice. I had this impulse to chuckle at myself and at us for being so angry and sad about it. But I think it’s important not to dismiss how dark that was and the pressures we were under.

Luke: The lack of a high school graduation put much more emphasis on college graduation. It made it even more special because it was now closing two big four-year chapters at once. I also look back, and I’m like, I was so mad for no reason. Obviously it was rough, but there’s a lot of larger challenges and things that people have to go through than missing out on one of two proms.

Editor: Do you think Peddie handled the challenges of the pandemic in the best way possible?

Luke: I think Peddie did a great job. They did all they could. I remember the Zoom graduation morning. I remember walking away disappointed. Looking back now, it pales in comparison to all the other things that we as adults actually think about and have to deal with. It almost feels petty looking back on it and still expressing any form of disappointment.

Julia: We say things like loss of prom and loss of graduation, but there were also a lot of non-trivial griefs and anxieties that we were going through, simple fears of the danger of going outside and really heavy ethical moral questions about weighing risk. We were reckoning with the hard stuff, too, and staying positive, or giving off an image of staying positive, or rallying our classmates to have hope during that time. It was a truly insurmountable ask of us, and forced us to reckon with a real deep sense of uncertainty.

Dennis: I certainly echo both a feeling of disappointment then, and that being valid, but also thinking about what we lost in the grand scheme of what many people were losing at that time. I appreciated that there was an effort to talk to us as the class leaders and to try to involve us. I remember there were these points of transparency where school officials admitted what they were feeling and the uncertainty that they were facing.

Editor: Julia, you mentioned in 2020 how heartbreaking it was to lose the spring play, having been deeply involved in theater at Peddie. Has returning to Peddie Theater helped you heal from that loss?

Julia: Something we all learned from sacrificing the experiences we lost during that time was to not take those experiences for granted. And every theater experience I’ve had since that time, I feel a heightened gratitude for being in the room together. Returning to Peddie has been the most beautiful nostalgia. I cherish all the lessons that I got out of my time as a student in Peddie Theater, and I approach it hoping to give the students some of that gift.

Editor: Back in 2020, you spoke about the responsibility you felt as class leaders to remain optimistic for your peers. How do you feel about the way your group handled that role?

Dennis: We were reaching for these silver linings. Whether or not we were truly believing it in our hearts, I think, hopefully, it made some level of a difference.

Luke: I definitely feel proud about our collective optimism. I haven’t really thought about this stuff in a long time, but I remember how optimistic we were about hoping to even get a graduation. I’m pretty proud of how we handled it, especially because it felt so unfair at the time.

Editor: Dennis, in 2020, you shared a story about waving your Peddie flag around the house after learning you wouldn’t be returning to campus. Do you still have that flag?

Dennis: I do remember it, and I still have that flag. It was actually the flag that the cross country team waved around on Blair Day. I remember keeping it after Blair Day, hoping maybe to bring it to future ones or to hand it down. When it finally got announced that we wouldn’t be returning to campus, I think waving around the flag was a moment of nostalgia and trying to come to terms with the moment.

Editor: Has experiencing such a significant disruption during a formative time impacted how you handle challenges now?

Bateman: It taught me to roll with the punches. When situations go wrong, it doesn’t really help to panic. It does you the best bit of good to just kind of figure it out, take it one step at a time and breathe through it.

Luke: Because we didn’t have a clear cut transition, I think it forced our class to think a lot harder about what we want and how to deal with real-world uncertainty. It forced us all to grow up a little bit faster.

Editor: Back in 2020, many of you felt that the shared trauma of that year would create a unique and lasting bond for the Class of 2020. Does the Class of 2020 remain as close-knit as you thought it would be?

Bateman: I absolutely think so. Obviously, it was quite horrible, but oddly, it set us up well to stay connected. I text with classmates probably every single week, at least a few different people. So I would say we’re definitely close-knit and have stuck together.

Dennis: In my interactions with Peddie classmates, it is now almost a humorous point to talk about how we spent the pandemic, the ways we coped and jumped right into what we’re doing now. And there’s a level of excitement that maybe is tied to the fact that we went through this trauma together. Beyond bringing our Peddie class together, the pandemic, in some ways, is a shared trauma between everyone in our generation. It’s certainly something that I think will continue to be a talking point moving forward. Maybe it’s something we’ll tell our kids one day or future generations when we say, “Back in my day … ” I think there is a unifying component to going through a shared event like this together.

Editor: If you could relive one Peddie memory from before the pandemic, what would it be?

Luke: The soccer game at Blair Day junior year. After four years of collegiate soccer, that’s still the greatest sports memory I’ve ever had. We were 1-10, we won one game, and it just so happened that the fate of Blair Day rested on the soccer team for once, which was very unusual because normally it’s the football team. I still have videos of it. I still look back at it. And it was just a great moment of camaraderie from the soccer team, and it was very emotional. We did what we had to do. We pulled out the win to tie Blair Day.

Julia: I would relive being a freshman in a Peddie Theater show, looking up to the talented older kids and feeling so lucky to be in the room with them and just dreaming about what was possible.

Dennis: Blair Day. I was on the cross country team, and each year it would be the seniors or those who were leading the team that would eventually hold a flag and lead a charge around the track in a final victory lap. One of my fondest memories is running around that track with teammates that I literally shed blood, sweat and tears with to give a final hurrah.

Bateman: The dorm experience my senior year was one of the most wonderful things. I’m actually going to get emotional now, but Coach Jensen [dorm supervisor] really paid attention to what kind of snacks we liked. One night she made melted chocolate and raspberries, which is one of my favorite snacks, and I think we ordered pizza. It was just kind of the coziest dorm night. Peddie was always a really peaceful and homey place for me. And that night was a perfect example of that.

Editor: What would you say to the current senior class at Peddie?

Dennis: Have fun. You make a lot of fun memories in that liminal space between the end of this one chapter in your life and then whatever uncertainty comes next.

Luke: Say yes to things. Go make that experience because you will look back and regret the things that you said no to when you could have said yes.

Julia: Embrace the unexpected, say yes to things and keep an open mind about what your path will be.

Bateman: Take all the opportunities that come at you because it’s such an exciting time and there’s going to be so many chances to join things and do things and experience new things. That was also a lesson from the pandemic. You don’t know how many choices you have until it’s all taken away.

Read the original story, “Missing Out On Milestones,” from the Spring/Summer 2020 Peddie Chronicle at peddie.org/2020.