College Life, but make it COVID.
Everyone looks forward to going to College. The freedom, the autonomy, the sitting in pajamas all day or waking up at noon without your mother breathing down your back to get up and be productive. It’s something every high school student looks forward to. Not in 2020 though.
At the beginning of March, I had a really interesting conversation with my parents, which consisted of them telling me to come home and me thinking it would only be two weeks before I’d be back at school living my best life. Little did I know that I’d be stuck at home, on the other side of the world, for 8 months. My family lives in Mumbai, India and I go to school in Seattle, USA. My classes had already been moved to Zoom and asynchronous Panopto recordings (the professors record the lectures and upload it to this software specifically designed for recorded lectures and video content) and I thought it would be fun to do class in this way for two weeks because surely I would be back in Seattle in no time.
Two days after I reached home, India went into a month-long lockdown, that kept extending and extending until all I knew was darkness and the four walls of my room. I know it sounds dramatic but it was a bleak few months. I was doing college from the other side of the world, so I was living on Pacific Standard Time in the Indian Subcontinent. It’s a 12 and a half-hour time difference, so I lived like a vampire would. I went to bed at 6 or 7 am and then woke up at 6 or 7 pm and so I got about an hour of daylight a day, which isn’t a particularly healthy way to live life, but at least I wasn’t failing classes and that’s what really mattered. What is a healthy lifestyle anyway as long as you’re doing well academically?
Initially, online classes sound like a lot of fun, right? You don’t have to actually look presentable and change out of your pajamas to go to class, you can just pull your laptop into bed and do class from there, and at first, it was fun. Then came all the drawbacks. Apart from the time difference, which was a problem, there was close to no interaction with other people. For some reason, everyone becomes more reserved on Zoom. Every time a professor said they were going to put us in Breakout rooms, you could see the number of participants in the meeting drop. Clearly, no one was a fan of video interactions with their peers. It was just awkward. Not being in a classroom really changed the way you interact with people and I’d gone from hanging out with my friends and talking to new people in class every day, to no interactions with people. Yes, I was living at home but because of my warped sleep schedule, I saw my family for about 4 or 5 hours a day before they’d go to sleep.
After a while, the Zoom classes get tedious too and don’t even get me started on how easy it is to fall behind when your professors choose to have their classes asynchronously so that you can watch the lectures whenever you want but hopefully you’ll do it during the scheduled class time. Spoiler alert: that did not happen. Now I’m not saying that no one watched their asynchronous lectures, I’m just saying that most of us probably binge-watched them or watched 2 in one sitting because we got lazy and decided to procrastinate on watching the lecture.
Quarantine was difficult for everyone, but I think it hit college students harder because we were acutely aware of everything we were missing out on. College years are supposed to be some of the best years of your life (when COVID doesn’t eat into a year and a half so you end up doing all your classes from home far away from your friends), that’s what we’re constantly told. Being told one thing and expecting the most fun years of your life and then going through something as life-altering as a pandemic is not something you’re prepared for. All of us had plans that we were excited about. I was supposed to move into an apartment with two of my best friends, which I didn’t get to do and won’t get to, because one of them graduates this year. I haven’t seen her in over a year. COVID took away a year and a half of what were supposed to be the best years of my life and I’m never getting that time back. I think the most important thing that came out of this is that we’re all painfully aware of the fact that nothing goes according to plan and we’re ready to live life BIG once we’re back at school this Fall. So help us out a little and get vaccinated please, we really want to be able to go out and meet friends in a safe space.
Until next time,
Sanj.
In the meantime, tell your friends!