Breaking News: The World DOESN’T Revolve around One Girl in her Bedroom
When my university (Uni of Sheffield) closed just before the approaching ugly head of the UK Covid-19 crisis, I was out working in a packed pub serving pints to middle aged lager louts and “it’s gin o’clock” types. My colleague came up to me and muttered “They’ve closed the uni you know!” and I quickly nipped into the back to text my mum the news. It all had the same feelings of my secondary school announcing snow days. An apprehensive excitement, as we watched this uncontrollable outside force cut us adrift and shake up our daily routine.
I thought it was maybe going to last two or three weeks, just whilst the member of staff who had tested positive for it isolated and got better.
That was the last shift I worked at the pub for six months. The little flurry snowballed into a mammoth blizzard of bad communication, sourdough baking and general cabin fever for the nation, followed by several non-committal, heavily regulated months of ‘Is this okay? Is this legal? It feels naughty but I’m sure it's okay now?’ We know how the story went.
So, I finished the second semester of my second academic year from my bedroom desk, mostly in my dressing gown, drinking pints of hot black coffee and staring aimlessly at the empty street below me. It was a real blow for me, as I had always been a genuine fan of studying. I loved packing my lunches into tupperware and picking a comfortable outfit to sit in the same spot on the long 70s style wooden desks in Western Bank Library for hours on end. As much as I moan and whine about my degree, I have an immense passion and appreciation of literature and film and to feel cut off from my learning was heartbreaking. Sitting watching scratchy recordings of last year's lectures in my bedroom could not match the experience of sitting in huge, echoing lecture halls with my fellow classmates and I exchanging looks of ‘What is this guy on about?’
My entire spring campus wardrobe was put back into storage. I ate cereal bars and chopped apples to mimic library snacks. I would go to bed with throbbing headaches from staring at a computer screen for 7 hours a day. I was bitterly disappointed that my beloved routine of a day on campus was shelved indefinitely. I’ve always prided myself on my commitment and dedication to academic practice and to feel my neat, studious world and aspirations stripped from me was painful.
I got inside my own head with bitterness and started harboring comical amounts of resentment. I knew people who had graduated years before me who had self confessedly hated uni and had regretted going, or didn’t bother turning up to classes. I felt a burning injustice against them; it was so unfair, because they hated uni and I loved it, so why should I get the short straw? Why did I have to compromise when they didn’t care anyway? I called my mum in floods of tears telling her I was retaking the year because I wanted the quote unquote, “full experience”.
I wasn’t ready to head into my final year having only had one real semester of teaching (First year doesn’t count, we all know this). “It’s so unfair, Mum, why is this happening to ME?” I cried, as if one girl in many having her uni classes put online was the absolute worst thing that had ever happened amidst the thousands of people falling ill and dying every day. She convinced me that as much as I wanted to drag it out, thousands of people were in the same boat and it just wasn’t possible to fund. I quickly realised that I had been wailing the laments of a mad woman anyway.
In the end, I managed to perform better in that semester than any other (Though I do believe a lot of that was down to the extreme leniency of lecturers due to the world sort of crumbling outside our four walls) and was super proud of my achievements. I relaxed over summer and banked on September being the magic oasis of calm that I wanted - it would all be sorted by then, we’d be back to normal. At the latest, it would all be fine by Christmas. LOL.
I have a few in person classes but this semester is mostly online. I’m still disappointed that my degree won’t be ‘normal’ (What does that word mean anymore) but I guess I’m kind of…over it? The combination of strikes, a pandemic and a general feeling of wanting to move on has solidified my mindset of ‘Grind and Get Out’. I’m a bit tired of being a student now. I still very much love learning but I am struggling to get excited for three months of basically The Open University. I can’t help feeling that I’ve been led down the garden path and then back up it and round in a grotesque miserable circle. I hope and pray that the second semester will be a little more conventional but as we career towards spike after spike of breakouts, I can’t say I feel particularly optimistic about it all. I hope at least I’ll get some sort of graduation ceremony (I refuse to slog my guts out and not even get a cute photo of me with my pals and a mortar board I REFUSE) and I still feel for all those who graduated via a glorified Skype call, and all the young doctors and nurses who were basically pushed into the real world prematurely.
None of us know what world we’ll be faced with in the coming months,but I hope that the hundreds of sacrifices each human being has made this year will count towards it all, even just a little.