I was relieved when I officially finished my first semester in April. The length of a full semester is only four months, but it was like a year for me. I finally finished my night patrolling (regular readers of the column know what I’m talking about) and could get some peaceful sleep at night after months of middle-of-the-night classes.
Honestly, I started off my first semester with a lot of excitement and enthusiasm, which turned into exhaustion and relief when I was finally done with it. I hope you don’t get the wrong idea when I say that it was exhausting—for the most part, I did enjoy learning online.
Some classes were really informative and, after the first two months, it felt normal studying online. I guess for everyone the difficult part was keeping up with the weekly tests and assignment submissions.
Some of my international friends were even working from home while attending classes and they still managed deadlines pretty well. I think for them it was tougher, but everyone really did well in exams and the semester in general. We adapted to online learning quickly because I think that’s human nature—we eventually just learn to manage things.
I really liked how we got our test and assignment results quickly. That’s one of the positive sides of online learning, and it’s how we can track our grades and aim to do better next time. That’s what I did, but I also made sure never to take my grades way too seriously. I’ve previously faced the consequences of taking grades too seriously; it just ends up making me more stressed, which is the case for many students out there.
So what I learned this semester, realistically, mattered more.
I often made it necessary to give space for improvements, for example, in one of my three statistics quizzes. I couldn’t score that well—I tried to find the reason and it was simply that I needed to practice.
In class, my professor mentioned once that if we don’t get the test results we want, it’s best to practice more next time. Well, I did exactly what our professor asked us to, and the result was that I scored better than before and I actually learned everything quite well. When we practice something a lot, it normally gets fixed in our brain for a long time.
What matters is how I felt when the online classes were done. I actually felt relieved and happy when I got the fruit of my hard work, and it did taste pretty sweet.
I am sure that next semester, if I have to study online again from home in India, I will still do my best, even if I have to sleep in the afternoon and stay awake at night again.
Cheers to studying online! To everyone who is home just like me, hang in there. It’s worth it!