The Impact of a Global Pandemic on College Life
03 Apr 2020
Initial Impressions
When planning my classes last semester, I had to take into consideration a lot of factors: will I have enough time for all my classes? Work? Free time? I never considered a global pandemic. Just one month ago, talk began of moving classes online due to the COVID-19. At the time, I was intrigued to hear that classes might be moving online. I thought this would drastically simplify my day to day. As it stood prior to the pandemic, I had to commute to school leaving the house at 6:00 am every morning and often ended up staying at school past midnight to get work done. I was exhausted from this cycle and desperately wanted a change of pace. School moving online was looking great for me and I hate to say this, but I was honestly a little excited to get to stay home. Well sometimes life gives you what you ask for, but never what you expect.
“When you get what you want but not what you need”
Initially coming back from spring break was like a slap to the face for me. I was completely unprepared for online classes. I am a creature of habit and did not respond well at all to the immediate change in my schedule. I have woken up minutes before my Zoom classes on multiple occasions, put off work I would normally do ahead of time and missed multiple homework assignments I would normally have done at home. The main reason I stayed so late at school everyday was because used to be incapable of getting work done at home. As soon as I get to my room, I either sleep or watch YouTube and then sleep. This worked just fine for me for the first half of the semester when I could stay at school all day long. Obviously, this was no longer going to work.
Breaking habits
This was the first semester where I intentionally tried to avoid doing homework at home. Up until the pandemic this was working better than expected for me, I had A’s in most of my classes and even got the highest score this semester on my ICS 311 midterm. This habit that had done so much for me in the semester was also my downfall with the shift to online classes. The fist day of online instruction hit like a brick. What I had worked so hard to achieve this semester came crashing down around me as I tried to just hold myself together. The first week was a complete mess; I ended up not doing either my WOD or practice WOD that week. Since then I have started to improve. I got all my work done for this class and have begun to catch up on my other classes. It has been far harder than I could have ever imagined, although I’m not quite sure what I expected.
At least I kept my job, but at what cost?
I am currently employed at the ITS Help Desk at UH Manoa, leading up to spring break we were all worried about whether we would still have a job in the upcoming months. I was relieved to find out the assisting with distance learning was meant that we are considered essential employees. However, with everything going on, there was bound to be compromises, and as it happens, there were. Due to the mass transition to online classes, the help desk received a huge influx of calls and emails. Even when we had 8 students and 6 staff working calls often went to voice mail because we simply could not answer them all—and this was the most amount of people we could possibly have. The typical situation is closer to 5 students and 3 staff. This might have been okay, but due to an abundance of caution, anyone who got sick was asked to take a week off just to be safe. This left us understaffed and over worked as both students and professors waited until the last moment to try and troubleshoot their issues. This led to just one more part of my life being thrown into chaos. That being said, I am still happy to have a job.
There are always some upsides… Right?
As I mentioned before, I was spending extremely little time at home as a result of trying to get all my work done at school. This would lead me to spend as little as an hour at home each day for days at a time. I was unhappy and exhausted beyond belief. Being forced to stay home has not been good for my grades, it has however been good for my sanity. I am able to get almost a full night’s rest waking up an average of 3 hours later than normal to get to my first class because I no longer have to worry about getting ready in the morning or spending an hour in traffic. This has also allowed me to see my family more, for weeks in the beginning of this semester I did not see my siblings that live in the same house as me. Now, I see and talk to them every day. In the end, I have no idea what to think of the entire situation. On one hand, I hate that I have been slacking on my schoolwork, on the other, I have been far less stressed and talked more with my family than I have in years.
Looking forward
In the upcoming months as we all experience this pandemic together, I hope to work on myself, with the extra time I got back from staying home and the stress that has been lifted, I hope to learn to work better at home and be a better family member. To do this will not be easy; first and foremost, I need to fix my mindset of getting no work done at home. I have been struggling with this the past two weeks but have been improving gradually. The first thing I did in this journey was to create a calendar of my weekly work to keep track of what is due as the days seem to blend together, I work to fight against the endless monotony of staying at home. All in all, I expect to learn a lot about myself as a person over the course of these next few months in what will hopefully just be a distant memory one day.