By: Blake Rabinowitz

Rewind three years. It’s 2020, the pandemic year, and you’re logging onto Zoom to class. Most high school students didn’t even know what Zoom was before the pandemic hit, and soon they were on it for hours at a time.

Fast forward to today. It’s hard to imagine life without Zoom. It’s changed the workspace, as many choose to work from home and attend meetings through Zoom. Furthermore, it has increased business productivity as workers are more likely to contact others outside and inside their departments with just the click of a button. Zoom has offered the medical field a way to offer life-saving advice from a Zoom
consultation, instead of the work it may take for one to get to a doctor’s office. It may also feel safer to talk with a doctor in one’s own home.

From a student perspective, Zoom has threatened snow days off, as school could simply take place online. However, it has afforded students with a platform for extra help outside of school hours. Many students participate in extracurricular activities and athletics, so a Zoom extra help session with a teacher can prove invaluable to their grades.

Last weekend, my friends and I attended a collegiate debate at Yale. Originally, some of us feared we would not be able to go because of hotel fees and missing school. However, Yale offered us the option for our debates to be online! This decreased the cost of the tournament and allowed us not to miss school to travel to Connecticut. Overall, it provided an opportunity for us we would not have had without Zoom.

A couple of years ago, our generation was associated with Snapchat and Instagram, but one can argue years from now our generation will be known for Zoom.