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Covid Journals: Feeling normal on the other side of the world5 min read

By Daniel Martin

During the Fall 2020 Semester, The Oppy will be publishing submissions from members of the Stern community about how the Covid-19 Pandemic has impacted their experience in and out of the program. If you wish to write about your own experience, please e-mail us at oppy@stern.nyu.edu

The following entry comes from Langone student Daniel Martin.

Since I moved to New York five years ago, I had wanted to go to NYU, so much so that Stern was the only MBA program I had applied for. I began classes as a Langone student this past spring, and I was honored to share a classroom with so many distinguished young professionals as I looked to grow my network and make new friends. Of course, like many others at Stern, I didn’t expect my time in the program to go exactly like this. I remain optimistic that we will have a widely-available vaccine by early next year, and I won’t have to complete my MBA entirely online, but even if my classes have all been on a computer screen, the Covid-19 Pandemic has been a wild ride. 

My wife and I decided to leverage the pandemic as an opportunity to travel and spend time with our family Florida and Asia. We spent the first few months in South Florida, and have now been in Taiwan since mid-July. 

Long quarantines became the norm in this bizarre time. We traveled to Florida from JFK for $25 each on an empty plane. Before disembarking, we had to sign paperwork that said we would be arrested and jailed for up to 60 days if we broke quarantine. Instead of collecting the paperwork individually, we had to throw it into a big plastic bag as we exited the plane. 

While flying to Florida had its peculiarities, being granted entry to Taiwan was its own huge undertaking. I was only allowed into the country because my wife is a Taiwanese citizen, and even with the help of family friends, who had worked as diplomats, it was an incredibly difficult back and forth that took a mountain of paperwork. It took four or five trips to the embassy to get my visa approved, get my two year old son’s citizenship established, and get my employment gold card issued. To get on the plane I needed to have a coronavirus test completed within three days. As a result, I had to rent a car and travel around to three different testing centers because CityMD was so backed up it was taking up to 14 days to get the results. 

Since arriving in Taiwan, I have finished a large portion my program while working remotely as a Securities Principal at a broker-dealer, being a father, and contributing to student life as the VP of Finance of the Stern Policy Forum. I was able to finish Statistics during Summer II and Strategy I & II during the summer intensives while in Asia. 

The price I’ve paid for that is now my sleep schedule is completely backwards. I spend a lot of the day in bed, which isn’t ideal, but it’s the only way we can live here while working on a New York schedule. This whole trip would be impossible without a huge amount of support from our nanny and my in-laws, who undoubtedly now think I’m a bum for sleeping so much at seemingly random hours.

Life in Taiwan, however, has been amazing. Despite being so distant culturally it has really been the closest feeling to normal I’ve felt since early March. Taiwan has had less than ten active Covid cases at any given time since April. Often there are just one or zero active Covid cases in the entire country. Taiwan’s experience with SARS has put them in a position that made the island nation an oasis in a sea of fear and uncertainty. 

While life in the U.S. was heavily restricted, in Taiwan I’ve been eating out in restaurants in a food paradise, seeing movies, and going to nightclubs and bars like everything is normal. All of that is because the government in Taiwan has done such an amazing job. Everyone wears their masks without question, there’s hand sanitizer everywhere, and someone is taking your temperature at the entry to every venue. 

One other thing that has improved the experience, and my biggest piece of advice to anyone living abroad for a while, has been deactivating my Facebook for a bit and making some attempt to turn down the social media. I felt like my mornings were turning into an endless scroll, and I’ve been way happier and more alert since I decided to take a break. 

We are returning to New York at the end of October, but I’ll never forget this time in Asia. The pandemic has been challenging, but at the same time, it has been a blessing in disguise. I have had such a great experience that our family might move here permanently in the not-too-distant future, but for now I am looking forward to seeing everyone back on campus. I know NYU is doing a great job handling the pandemic and I hope everyone is doing well. Mostly, I can’t wait to do all those things I was so excited for when I enrolled in this program. This may not have been the MBA experience I was anticipating, but it has already been an experience I won’t forget.

Photo credit: Daniel Martin

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