Dominik Kulusic, a German graduate student, hiked and cycled all of Virginia’s state parks during the past 12 months (pictured here in Richmond).
By spring 2020, Dominik Kulusic, a 26-year-old German graduate student in human resources management at Rutgers University, was caught in the crosshairs of the pandemic. Classes were remote. The student gym closed. The Big Apple, a nearby lure, was no longer an option. And by February his housemates, fellow German nationals, had trickled away.
So last April the peripatetic Kulusic left New Jersey for Virginia at the urging of friends. Richmond was his old stomping grounds: In 2016, while an undergraduate at the University of Konstanz in southern Germany studying political science and public administration, he spent a semester at the University of Richmond.