Leaving home to move on to a college campus is all about new connections – living with roommates, going to classes, joining clubs, playing sports, socializing, dating… all of which, of course, are either severely curtailed or banned outright under COVID protocols. So what is it like to live in a dorm right now? In this episode, Char gets the insider’s view from Seth Grossman, Director of Housing and Residence Life at City College, and Angie, a freshman living on campus at the College of Staten Island.

It's 2021, and we finally have several viable vaccines for COVID-19, but that doesn't mean the pandemic is over. They need to be manufactured, they need to be distributed... and even then very real cultural obstacles exist to vaccinating enough of the population to allow social distancing to end. In this episode, we hear from people in the CUNY community who are working hard to make the vaccine not only available but also acceptable to the people who need to receive it.

Many of us don't often associate college with homelessness, but as many as 14% of CUNY students have no fixed address - some living on couches, and many relying on shelters or living on the street. How does someone manage to work and study with that kind of personal instability? What if you're also trying to take care of a family while doing it all? And how about now, when COVID-19 has made everything more difficult for everybody? To find out, Char speaks to Nicholas Freudenberg, Distinguished Professor at CUNY School of Public Health and recent graduate Kassanda Montes, who lived in shelters with her young son for the majority of her time as a student at Lehman College.