Edited by Aneesha Chandra
One and a half years into the pandemic, we’ve already heard many stories about the online university experience—the loneliness, the listlessness, and the extreme alienation from both the physical college campus and the community in general. Last year, a new cohort of students began their university life on Zoom and it looks like the same fate is going to befall this year’s incoming batches. Most of the articles I’ve read tell the story of the undergraduate freshman, the newbie just out of school who is thrust haphazardly into a bewildering space that was already a whirlwind before the pandemic ever occurred. But what of the postgraduate? What is it like to arrive (in the non-literal sense of the term) at a brand new university having already experienced what must have been a rich and full college life? In a conversation with Shatakshi Whorra, a student of the MA English program at Ashoka, I learned about what it means to be a postgraduate student in the online atmosphere and, interestingly, how the progression from undergraduate to postgraduate, from offline to online coincides, giving rise to a whole new dimension of the university experience.
Shatakshi joined the first-ever MA English batch at Ashoka last year (the academic year 2020-2021) following the gap year she took after doing a degree in Political Science from Ramjas College, Delhi University. When asked about her college life before Ashoka, she immediately stressed the distinction between her current institution and her previous one— the latter was offline and that made a world of difference. She said about her DU experience: “It was a completely new space. I was out there on my own and everyone was really enthusiastic about being there because it was in person and everyone was looking to explore new things.” While she adjusted to her undergraduate life fairly easily, Ashoka presented a tougher time. “It was online so I guess people were more hesitant because we were all physically someplace and mentally completely somewhere else so we didn’t feel as connected. It took me 6 weeks to actively start talking to someone and get comfortable with them,” she elaborated. This is the part of the online world that is most familiar to all of us—the utter awkwardness of having meetings or events with absolute strangers and trying to gauge the social situation with no more information than the image of a small box with an even smaller person inside of it.
Reflecting on her college life at Ramjas, Shatakshi said, “My undergraduate was all about exploration—an exploration of the self, exploring what I liked, what I didn’t like, seeing the city of Delhi for the first time…” Her time with the literary society there, which did academic work outside the classroom, even helped her realize that she wanted to continue with English Literature and not Political Science. Postgraduate life, however, is different. While her Bachelor’s degree was spent on great personal development and interdisciplinary experimentation, Shatakshi has found that her Master’s degree has, so far, been a much more focused endeavor. “I am now much more focused on my career, my academics, on being in an English Department for the first time. I’m exploring what I want to do in my thesis, my writing, so it’s still a personal journey but it’s more oriented towards my academic interests and career development than personal growth,” she told me. The transition from one university experience to another has therefore been one of honing in on a particular area of study from a broader field of interests.
The spotlight on academics in postgraduate studies has been placed under even more emphasis in the world of online education. It has become the node through which all interaction is routed. Social relationships have become dependent upon shared courses and common scholastic interests. Even though the MA program had its own Orientation week with online icebreaker sessions, workshops on sexual harassment, and introductions to the various offices and resources at Ashoka, Shatakshi said that the real icebreaking happened through her classes. She particularly pointed out the Seminar in Literary Theory she took in her first semester, which went a long way in alleviating the disconnect between students. She said, “We had been put into groups and asked to discuss the readings, which really helped. I was feeling lots of anxiety about the course and I realized that all of us felt the same way. It was a bad boat to be in but at least you had other people with you.” Classes even led to doing other activities together, like having an 8 AM breakfast video call before a lecture or a rant session afterward. Without the opportunity to physically hang out with classmates after class (getting coffee together or heading to the Dhaba to chill), students jumped on video calls with virtual strangers in an effort to make friends.
As a result of online education conflating academic life with social life, students don’t often meet people outside of their coursework. This is especially impactful on postgraduate students who, because of their focused approach, mostly take classes only within their own department. Shatakshi remarked, “I don’t really know anyone outside of the English department. I met a couple of people in other batches because they were TAs or were taking the same classes as I was but otherwise my friend circle is limited to the department.” She also met a couple of YIFs when she was physically on campus in the Spring 2021 semester.
The MA program, like other postgraduate programs, is much smaller than the undergraduate one and has a much clearer aim. This naturally makes the department closer, with the student-student and student-faculty bonds being stronger than usual even in the physical university experience. However, in the online semester, the academic department becomes the only connection to the university for students which makes their departmental ties stronger but their institutional ties more distant. Shatakshi told me, “I really really love the department, but I don’t associate myself with Ashoka as such. I don’t know what it means to be an Ashokan.”
The issue at stake here is bigger than the postgraduate experience—it concerns all those students who have come into the university online, those who don’t have any knowledge of the physical space of Ashoka. Is it true that the Ashokan experience cannot be translated online? That those students who have joined the college in the last and coming years aren’t ‘true Ashokans’? Or perhaps, we might look at it somewhat differently. Perhaps, this is the beginning of a new kind of Ashokan, one who doesn’t have the geographical tie of being on campus and ‘immersed in its culture’ so to speak, and is yet just as important a part of the university as anyone else. What was once thought of as the unique experience of beginning your education online is now being felt in different and tangible ways across programs and those relationships that have been forged on the foundation of academics are just as real as those made on campus.