University during a pandemic

It's nearly the end of October and I've now been in Aberdeen for six weeks and had one month of second year classes so I thought I'd write a quick update on how it's all going. (actually it turned into not such a quick update)

The studying

Like many universities this year, Aberdeen is following a blended learning approach. This means that I have a mixture of small on campus classes and online material to work through each week.

Because I'm doing a language, I have more contact hours than most people - I have a French language seminar and an oral class on campus every week, an economics tutorial every 2-3 weeks and the occasional finance tutorial. My classes have 4-8 people in them and we sit at very widely-spaced desks (disinfected before and after sitting down) and wear face masks whenever we're inside a building. There are one way systems in place across the university, hand sanitisers at every entrance and to me it feels very safe. I am just grateful to have some time on campus because it makes a welcome change from looking at a laptop screen. Seeing familiar faces is really nice, I get to talk to classmates that I wouldn't otherwise see, it gets me out of the house, it helps to keep me motivated and I find it much easier to participate in-person than I do in an online webinar.

Aside from the on-campus classes, I also have a lot of studying to do on my own. Each week pre-recorded lectures are released for French, finance and economics. These usually take 1-2 hours each. For French we are also given listening comprehension exercises, grammar exercises, reading comprehension and translation work, preparation reading for the next oral class as well as pages to read in our grammar textbook and vocabulary to learn. For finance we get some exercises each week to put the lecture material into practise. For both finance and economics we also get longer problem sets to work through in preparation for tutorials as well as textbook reading every week.

It probably sounds like I have a lot more French to do than anything else and sometimes it does feel that way but I enjoy the French and it's something I really want to learn so I don't mind. Besides, if it's a hard economics or finance topic it can take plenty of time to get my head round it!

One thing about the new teaching approach this year is that it relies more than ever on students' self motivation. It's up to students when and if they watch lectures, whether they watch from bed or in front of the TV and if they bother taking notes or not. I wouldn't be surprised if some people only looked at those lectures a week or two before the exam. Most exercises are self-assessed so there's nothing to stop you from skipping some or not really trying. It's easy to fall behind on material when there are so few fixed deadlines and nobody checking up on you, especially if you aren't used to doing this level of independent studying.

Overall I'm quite enjoying the blended learning so far. I really value the contact hours I do have but it's also nice to have lectures recorded so that I can go through at my own pace, pausing to take notes, going back over parts I don't understand and doing it at a time that suits me. I'm liking my courses for the most part though finance is as confusing as ever. We're just getting to that point in the term where we start getting assessments so things get a little more stressful but overall it's a very manageable workload and the content is pretty interesting.

Beyond the studying

Obviously you don't go to university just to study all the time and I've been doing plenty of other things outside the classroom. This is the side of university that has really suffered under covid. Normally there would be hundreds of events going on, society activities, workshops, nights out, trips into town, flat parties and social gatherings. Currently we're not allowed to visit another household indoors and no more than two households can meet outdoors or in a cafe. University societies cannot hold any in-person meetings or events, indoor pubs close at 6pm and just about everything that students normally do is cancelled or banned. It's not great but there are some things that I've been doing instead.

Societies

Though societies can't meet up for the moment, many have been running online events. This year I'm in the baking society, the Harry Potter society and the Scottish dance society. The baking society has at least two events a week - tea club on a Tuesday afternoon where we drink tea and chat over a video call about the things we've been baking that week, and a screening of the Great British Bake Off every Wednesday. I'm really enjoying watching Bake Off as it's a programme I watched years ago when it was on the BBC but haven't made time for it recently. This has reminded me how good it is and so many people watch it that it makes for a great topic of conversation! Each week we all make predictions on who we think will be star baker and who will go home and get a point added to the scoreboard for every correct guess - my guesses are usually completely off! It's a good activity that we can do from home and I always look forward to a Wednesday night of knitting in front of the TV watching Bake Off! It's also inspired me to bake bread for bread week, Viennese Whirls for biscuit week and apple tart for pastry week. The baking society also has some virtual baking workshops and the next one coming up is bramble crumble.

The Harry Potter society is a new one for me this year but they've been holding some creative and fun online events including a Harry Potter themed games night and a Halloween pumpkin-carving evening. The games night included virtual pictionary (with items and characters from the wizarding world), who am I (20 yes/no questions to work out which character from the books you are) and a scavenger hunt (30 seconds to find an item in your house for each category, eg your best potions ingredient, something in each of the house colours, something to represent your favourite character, etc.)

I'm on the committee for the Scottish Dance society but obviously it's not one that lends itself particularly well to social distancing. Nevertheless, we're now running online dance classes every week which include some Scottish Country technique, some Scottish step and some highland dance. It's under an hour long and sometimes it's difficult with limited space but it's fun to see everyone dancing in their rooms over video and we chat after the class so I think it's well worth running the sessions just to keep the society going until the pandemic is over. Glasgow also organised a quiz last week for all the university Scottish dance societies in Scotland which was really fun and it was great to see so many familiar faces from the dances last year.

Other bits and pieces

Aside from my university courses and being on the Scottish dance society committee, I am also doing some activities which I hope will increase my employability, give me something to put on my CV and help me to decide what I want to do in the future.

I am a class rep for my French course which means I talk with other people on my course and pass on any feedback to the course coordinators at departmental meetings. This is a role that has turned out to be a lot more interesting than I expected it to be because I learn all about what other people think of different aspects of the course and I get to find out more about the organisation behind the course and get to know the lecturers and my classmates better.

I am doing a virtual internship with KPMG on data analysis which is not a sector I had really thought about before but it actually seems quite fun and possibly an area I would want to work in. Definitely more interesting than the financial services internship I did over the summer.

I have been going to some of the events run by the Bright Network, the university careers service and various academic societies which have included meetings with careers advisers, workshops on CV writing, talks on improving your LinkedIn profile, advice on career planning, insight into different sectors, etc. They're usually quite useful and they help me get a better idea of what I should be doing.

As I'm taking French as part of my degree, one of the requirements of the course is that I spend at least 4 months abroad next year. I've been trying to do some research on where I might go and what I might do. There are so many choices that it's really very hard to know what to do so it takes a fair amount of time to read up on all the options. Right now I'm looking at various universities in France, Belgium and Switzerland, particularly trying to find places that offer economics modules, places I think will force me to speak the most French and places that I think would be nice to live in. I'm also looking into the possibility of doing an internship or work placement somewhere in France which I think would be really beneficial but it's a bit more difficult to organise. The opportunities I find will also determine whether I decide to spend just one semester abroad or to go for a full year which I need to decide by December so there's plenty of research to be done.

One of my favourite things to do when I've got a spare moment is to write this blog. I have lots of pieces I'm working on sitting unposted in my drafts section and many may never be published but I really like having this platform to document this time in my life and I like that it's completely my own: on here I can write what I like without having to fulfil a subject brief or write in the most eloquent English and that means I enjoy it so much more than I did when it was a task for school.

I've also been trying to keep reading for fun. Right now I'm reading Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky (author of The Perks of Being a Wallflower). It's very good and completely not what I expected. I've joined the Aberdeen city library so that I can borrow fiction books whilst I'm up here and I've also got a stack of French books I want to read sitting waiting on my bedside table.

I'm still knitting - working on a blanket and trying my first pair of socks at the moment. Unfortunately I've run out of wool for the blanket and I think I need to restart my sock but it keeps me busy and gives me something to do whilst watching TV. Speaking of TV, my flatmate and I have been watching a few things recently. We first watched Ratched which is a psychological thriller series on Netflix about a nurse working in a psychiatric hospital. It was very creepy but it grew on me and was hard to stop watching. Now we're watching Lucifer which is pretty great. We also watched the film Halloween last weekend after decorating the house for halloween and it's one of the scariest films I've watched all the way through. It's about an escaped serial killer, filled with jump scares and murder. We decided we'd better start locking our front door at night after that.

I am still going to the gym almost every day and it's great to be back there after a summer of home exercise. It gives me something to leave the house for and it's the main place where I see other people. There are still exercise classes running and I've been going to lots of those - I've found my favourite classes and my favourite instructors and for now I'm loving it. It's one of the few things that's almost as good as it was pre-pandemic. Really the only differences are that you have to prebook all gym sessions, wear a mask when going to the gym or a class, be more vigilant about wiping down equipment after use, bring your own yoga mat, space out more and there aren't any classes which use equipment. They're fairly minor things which are no trouble to do. I still haven't tried the swimming pool which is included in my membership but perhaps sometime soon I will.

I think that's pretty much it from me. Overall I'm enjoying university life despite the lockdown restrictions but ever hopeful that things will be returning to some degree of normal soon. Last year was so amazing and I really feel for the first years now - everyone's missing out on so much this year.

#university #lifeupdate #pandemic