By Layla Colakovic
Producing music, baking and making bracelets are three hobbies that have kept students busy while social distancing.
Many students have picked up hobbies and other special interests during the pandemic to keep themselves entertained, and connected to others.
Although students haven’t been able to spend time with others in the ways they did prior to the pandemic, they have found various ways to keep both their minds and bodies busy while remaining physically distanced from others.
Shelby Fogarty is a junior vocal performance major. She said she found many ways to keep herself busy during the quarantined months of the pandemic.
“Knitting was in April, and then from there I did cross stitching in June,” Fogarty said. “Cooking and baking new recipes was around July and August.”
Even though Fogarty said she had many of these skills already, she said she feels they became much stronger over the course of the pandemic.
“I did more of these than I usually do, though,” Fogarty said. “This time I did multiple projects at a time.”
Some students choose to focus their skills for a cause or for growth as an artist, but to Fogarty, her art is more personal.
“They’re really just my regular hobbies. I’d really do these by myself and then I’d just post pictures on my Instagram for fun,” Fogarty said.
Shelby Fogarty’s cooking skills come through with donuts and other treats like gnocchi and macaroons. Photo courtesy of Shelby Fogarty.
Ana Mort – a senior majoring in pre-med and liberal studies – started making bracelets for Border Angels during quarantine.
“Over quarantine, I kept seeing things on the news about BLM[Black Lives Matter] and stuff that was happening about ICE,” Mort said. “I was starting to get really frustrated, and I thought it was a good idea to do something about it.”
Black Lives Matter is a movement using non-violent protesting against police brutality and racially motivated violence against people of color. Whereas, issues with ICE are where undocumented immigrants in the U.S. are being targeted and deported as children are placed in cages for extended amounts of time without their families.
During the recent protests and social turmoil, Mort decided to create for a cause.
“The first thing I thought to do was to make bracelets and start selling them for $8,” Mort said. “Then I would donate it to a non-profit called Border Angels.”
Through social media, Mort said she has seen very promising results with lots of sales on her bracelets.
“I expected to get $50 to $100 at most,” Mort said. “Right now, I’m at about $800.”
Social media have played a large role in creating interactions and bringing people together during the pandemic.
“It’s pretty crazy to see the amount of impact social media had with this,” Mort said. “It was from people I knew, didn’t know, people I haven’t talked to in years.”
Mort said that a lot of her social media feedback was from her personal social media accounts, which she used as a tool to show off her bracelets.
“Most of it [feedback] was from my Snapchat following,” Mort said. “There was about 10 percent of it from Instagram.”
Mort said she does more than make only bracelets for the Border Angels.
“I make keychains, bracelets [and] necklaces, and each I sell for $8,” Mort said.
Senior Matt Simon is a communication major with a minor in marketing communication. Even before the start of COVID-19, Simon created music and was working on producing new content.
Simon said he went to Bonnaroo, a music festival in Tennessee, in 2017 and gained inspiration to make his own music.
“I had never been to a concert before in my life,” Simon said. “I wasn’t even that into music.”
Simon said he saw Porter Robinson and distinctly remembers a portion of his performance called “Virtual Self.”
“It was one of the best shows I had ever seen,” Simon said. “I decided I wanted to do that.”
Simon said he isn’t trained in music theory – but that he has been developing and creating music without formal training.
“I’ve been working on Ableton [music production software] going on five years now,” Simon said. “I started on Logic Pro, with some ripped version off a sketchy website.”
“When I decided that I wanted to do more, I downloaded Ableton from this guy I met my freshman year who had a trial version,” Simon said.
Simon has produced new music that he will release on SoundCloud, which already has many of his earlier songs.
“I’ve made several songs and I’m about to put all of them out,” Simon said. “I’m also about to have a big content boom that I’m really excited about.”
Simon’s stage name is “Nomis.wav” Nomis is Simon spelled backwards and he added the “.wav” because he wanted to stand out, because he noticed a lot of other artists named Simon who’d changed their name to Nomis.
Simon said the created content will be a combination of audio and visuals.
“It’s going to be a bunch of music and a bunch of visuals that I’ve worked on,” Simon said.
To promote his content, Simon uses various social media platforms
“In terms of social media, I am heavily on Instagram [and] I’m sort of on Twitter,” Simon said. “SoundCloud is really what all my stuff is out on.” said Simon.
As far as distribution, Simon said there are a few options he uses to expand his audience.
“There is a distribution service I use called Distrokid which I’ve used to get my music on Apple Music and Spotify,” Simon said. “I pay like $30 and I have all these different platforms it [Distrokid] puts it [content] out on.”
Self [Ep] by Nomis.wav