After almost two years of online learning, this semester students were finally able to return back to in-person classes and I am loving it. Yes, this was a risky move in the sense that Covid hasn’t magically vanished, but man do I find it well worth it.
To give a little context, I was in grade 12 when Covid hit, so my second half of senior year gave a little teaser trailer as to what online learning was like, and trust me when I say I did not want any part of it. In all honesty, I didn’t attend most classes, especially after the school principal told us our teachers aren’t allowed to lower our grades, whether we do the work or not. To me, this sounded like an invitation to not put any more effort in, handed to us on a silver platter. And of course, I was raised to have manners, so how could I ever possibly decline such a thoughtful invitation. In hindsight, this probably wasn’t the best idea considering I was going into engineering, and just might need to know if “the limit does not exist,” but that’s not the point of this article. What I was trying to get at is that I ended up taking a gap year to avoid school, so to do the math of that for you, I’m now in my first year of engineering.
When I first started university, I was fully online and I made friends by finding the very few girls in the program and dm-ing them on Instagram. Looking back on it now, I definitely could’ve creeped some people out, but instead, I found eight amazing friends. From that core group, not many other friends had branched into the group, that is until in-person classes rolled around.
At first, I was extremely nervous to start at a new school and be in classes with literally hundreds of people I don’t know, but I came over that fear very quickly. Sometimes I just magically forget that I’m actually an extremely extroverted person, so I thought I wasn’t going to meet any new people and that classes were going to be boring, but boy was I wrong. Still, after almost two months of being in person, I make a new friend every day I’m in-person (roughly three days a week) and I love it. This is especially fun when in a program like engineering where you all have virtually the exact same class schedules, so whether you need a lab partner or need someone to study with between classes, there will literally always be someone I can approach.
Although I could go on and on about how I always have someone I can ask for help with homework or that the world is full of such interesting people, there are a few issues with it. For starters, because I’m such a chatty Cathy, I almost never have a productive afternoon between classes because our building is made for collaboration. At times, there will be up to 20 of us sitting and standing around a table, so I can jump from conversation to conversation as much as I please. So as I’m sure you’ve already assumed, I don’t get much work done at those times.
Overall, I couldn’t be happier that we’ve returned to in-person because of all the friends I’ve made, the fact I’m no longer falling asleep staring at my laptop listening to a lecture, and that I can now experience, as my parents say it, “the real university experience.” So the takeaway is that as someone who was never huge on school, I can already tell these next four years are going to fly by.