South Bend, IN
I just can’t overstate how much more difficult this situation is for students who are parenting… I understand that there are other challenging situations people face, but I often feel alienated further by the fact that I am parenting while working on my PhD, and the COVID crisis seems to have exacerbated that.
New Haven, CT
Overall, I’m not learning anything. At all. It is a huge waste of time and money. I’m lucky I’m still in my undergraduate because the upper level classes that I’ll need to eventually take do not translate well online. I wish I could still be living at school, seeing my friends on a daily basis, being involved on campus, going to the gym, going out with friends, having movie nights, etc. I miss the way my life was. It was perfect. I had all my shit together and in a blink of an eye, everything that mattered to me shifted so drastically it was unrecognizable. I even miss my two on-campus jobs. I miss the routine of everything, the feelings of accomplishment I would get after having a successful board meeting for one of the organizations I was involved in. If classes are online for another semester, assuming it does not affect my scholarships or financial aid, I am highly considering taking a semester off until everything is back to normal.
West Lafayette, IN
I miss the walks to class to clear my head, running into people on campus, the unexpected parts of the day that come from being in a crowd of people, e.g., who you might see or what you might experience, completing group or hands-on projects, conferences or meetings, the camaraderie of sporting events, sitting in a lecture to listen in on the info while last-minute completing another assignment and the adrenaline rush that comes with it, or just sitting to listen to get a break in your day when you don’t have to run to the next thing, talking to customers at my part-time coffeehouse job or meeting friends after class at a coffee shop, having a personal connection with professors whether working on a project or hearing about how their kids are doing. Basically, all the best parts of school and education are taken from us (collaboration, the challenge of learning, being amongst other learners on campus) and we have just been left to do the crappy parts.
Denton, TX
I can’t really stand it. We must study for tests, tests that people can cheat on because we don’t actually learn the material with this hodge podge online learning system. I’m not learning. I could watch the class recordings all day and not learn this way unfortunately. My motivation to learn has gone down the drain. I have started cooking much more, and putting mandatory time aside to walk several miles a day. Aside from that, school has become ‘that thing’ I do briefly every other day where I google answers, write them down, and turn them in for a grade.
Fresno, CA
Something interesting is that so many schools have insisted that almost all classes have to be on campus which has actually caused large limitations for the disabled community. This pandemic has shown not only is it possible but rather easy to have classes online. I’m hoping after this more universities and colleges open up to more online options, so that those of us who can’t physically attend can have the same access and opportunities as everyone else.
Wilmington, DE
My theater class was already a little weak to begin with. The professor would go on sometimes incoherent tangents and the class as a whole was bored and unengaged. Over Zoom I think the students are given a better setting to pay even less attention, and now some of the more physical elements of the class are totally void. It’s almost comically bad. We no longer have “warm-ups” (which involved some game or physical exercise we were supposed to do at the beginning of the class), we can no longer see the plays we were expected to attend (we were given movies to watch instead), and the monologues we were expected to memorize and recite were performed over Zoom instead, which allowed students to just read theirs off their screens.
Elgin, IL
My production methods class used to be very fun because we did a lot of physical projects. The switch to online classes made it harder and overwhelming as my professor did not ease up on course work. We now had to digitally respond to classmates’ work instead of in-person critiques. We also used to have required field trips but they were turned into required reflections on certain videos and articles.