Not the Last Semester This Senior Hoped For
Ani Zivzivadze calls herself a determined and hopeful person who loves dancing and playing chess. She believes that finding yourself is the most important thing and everyone should pursue it. “I did find myself at AUBG,” Ani says. “I found out who I really am and who I want to be.”
Ani describes herself as an introvert who’s interested in computers. “I chose to develop myself in a sphere I like and where I noticed I can work a lot without getting tired,” she says. That’s why she decided to double major in Computer Science and Information Systems. She is a graduating senior and she believes that her biggest accomplishment is enrolling at AUBG.
Since Ani’s an only child and her parents are very protective, she needed a lot of power to leave home country, Georgia. “To go out of my comfort zone and come to AUBG was the best decision I’ve made,” she says. Going abroad and living alone for four years widened Ani’s horizons. She discovered that she loved travelling and she managed to visit many countries in Europe during her breaks from university.
Even though Ani enjoys travelling, she doesn’t want to leave AUBG. “I just love the campus and I don’t want to go, knowing that I will graduate and never come back here,” she says. That’s why Ani is still on campus after the coronavirus outbreak and the shift to online classes. She had to pack and unpack everything in order to move to a different building of the campus which, she says, was a challenge but she still wanted to stay at AUBG.
She’s trying to prolong her time in Blagoevgrad even though everything is very different due to the virus. “It’s sad and it’s so quiet now,” Ani says. She is alone in a room, separated from her roommate. She’s not allowed to go to the canteen or leave the residence after 9 p.m. until 7 a.m. What she really misses is hanging out with friends in groups which is also forbidden. “It’s suffocating sitting in a room and not communicating,” she says.
Apart from feeling sad, Ani felt angry as well. “I’ve been waiting for my graduation for four years and now the ceremony got cancelled,” she says. However, she believes that the quarantine was still the right thing to do. “The safety measures should have been taken and that’s the way to stop the virus,” Ani says. She hopes that way things will stabilize sooner.
Once things go back to normal, Ani wants to pursue her Master’s degree. She also wants to work in the US during the summer. She went there three times and she is fascinated by the US. Her dream is to find a job and settle there and her motto is: “Just pursue your dreams and the things you like doing.”
This is a part of a series of stories created for Professor Laura Kelly's Writing for Media class where students profiled their classmates who were quarantined on campus during the COVID-19 pandemic in Spring 2020.