What it’s really been like for a graduate student during this pandemic (or at least for me!):
There are many days where I want to take all of my classes from bed, but setting apartment boundaries has been a necessity in surviving the last year of zoom university. I never do this-okay maybe I did it once, but it is not sustainable! Trust me.
The past year-
My university switched to a remote platform over night -one year ago-so I actually didn’t have time to process that change much. It all happened so fast and it was in the midst of internship interviews- most of which fell through because READ in the voice from that tik tok I know you’ve seen: WE ARE IN A PANDEMIC! The last year has been filled with zoom class, zoom teaching, zoom office hours, zoom study parties, & zoom thesis support groups.
Remote school and the zoom of it all have oddly become second nature. Would I rather be on my beautiful campus chatting with my friends in real life? ABSOLUTELY. Does it suck to literally be glued to one chair at the kitchen table (or my couch tbh) for upwards of 11 hours a day? YOU BET! But, I’ve really just been rolling with the punches because that’s all I can do.
My zoom survival schedule-
Setting apartment boundaries and breaking up my day by working areas and hours vs. leisure areas and hours has been a life saver and maintaining some sort of routine. For me this has meant I literally cannot go back in my bedroom after waking up, trying to work at the table or peninsula exclusively, and saving couch time for after school as much as I can. I try to keep a regular schedule of a morning walk, working out , lunch, and after class dinner & leisure breaks. This was the only way I could continue to hold myself accountable during this weird time of being inside all day. Having a schedule really helped the urge to binge watch HGTV at all hours. That’s been super helpful and I think I will incorporate this same strategy as school winds down and potential remote career time starts.
Lastly, I want to note that I am in school for public health, so this has been a really intriguing time for the whole world to be focused on concepts my classmates and I have spent years diving into. I think that is some of the reason why I’ve been relatively calm, cool, and collected during this whole time. When “lock-downs” got extended several times the reasoning has really made sense to me because I have access to a lot of background information. I also never thought we’d be out of this in a few weeks as was advertised to the public. I anticipated at least a year from early talks I attended on the issue of the pandemic so I didn’t have the same hope get crushed several times.
I wanted to keep this short, but I also wanted to make sure I document what’s been going on the past year so I have something to look back on and reflect on the weird, scary, and dare I say it *unprecedented* time this has been. Coincidentally, I’ve been locked out of my blog this whole time lol, but my insta have plenty of footage of what I’ve been up to!
Until next time!
-T