I know the whole coronavirus shit has everyone shook and all, but it ain’t the fuckin purge. It is 👏🏼 MIDTERM 👏🏼 SZN👏🏼 Let me get a good night’s sleep pls. I’m not tellin y’all to stop ur wildin, just contain it pls
The number of submissions posted on TigerConfessions peaked during the initial COVID lockdown period. Students expressed their frustrations about the massive change with one another.
The greatest number of submissions in a single day ever was on May 9, 2020, with 213 submissions, at the height of the MAT 202 scandal. MAT 202 fit perfectly into the mold of TigerConfessions — an issue that impacted lots of students, demanded anonymity and created a shared resentment against the University.
In fact, the four days with the highest number of submissions were all in May 2020.
With 176 posts, March 10, 2020 — the day before the University announced that all classes would continue online until the end of the semester — was the only day outside of May 2020 to break into the top five days for submissions.
Some posts reflected on the large gatherings on campus as students were sent home:
I know the whole coronavirus shit has everyone shook and all, but it ain’t the fuckin purge. It is 👏🏼 MIDTERM 👏🏼 SZN👏🏼 Let me get a good night’s sleep pls. I’m not tellin y’all to stop ur wildin, just contain it pls
Others contained simple pleas:
Please, I don’t want my graduation to be online.
As students slowly returned to campus, they heavily discussed the social contract. Between Sept. 1, 2020 and Feb. 26, 2021, 55 students faced disciplinary action for violating guidelines limiting gatherings and mandating masks.
Posters on TigerConfessions debated social contract guidelines, one writing:
it gives me so much anxiety seeing my friends just blatantly disregard the social contract and it makes me so frustrated knowing that theyre having a better time here than me because theyre able to not care i guess.
Others felt differently, one student writing:
odds of the university continuing its draconian social contract even with everyone being vaccinated next year i mean there’s really no reason we should be anything but 100 normal with everyone vaccinated
Mentions of the words “coronavirus” peaked in March of 2020 then rapidly declined. Submitters instead used “covid,” which rose in post frequency before hitting a peak in January 2021, when some undergraduates returned to campus while still attending classes on Zoom. Since then, mentions of the word “covid” have peaked again in August of 2021 (when all undergraduates returned to campus for in person learning), and January 2022, during the beginning of the Omicron variant wave.
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The video conferencing tool Zoom moved from niche use pre-pandemic to a mainstay of virtual options. Posts with the word “Zoom” rose sharply in March 2020, and again in September 2020: the start of the University's first fully virtual semester.
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Mentions of the word “vaccine” hit an all-time high during April of 2021, when the COVID-19 vaccine became available to most college-aged students. The second-highest peak was in August 2021, when Princeton reimplemented an universal indoor mask mandate, and students returned to campus fully in-person for the first time since the pandemic started. The fraction of posts containing the word “mask” peaked that same month.
Posts about vaccines were typically positive, sharing advice on how to get a shot or talking about their experiences with it, with the occasional joke:
next year puid parties on the street will be replaced by vaccine card parties