It’s been a long year at Zoom University, but it finally seems like things are getting back to some semblance of normalcy.
I’ll admit, there is a certain strangeness in walking into a classroom and seeing everyone wearing masks, but I can say for certain I am more than grateful to be back in person.
Sure, this isn’t quite how I imagined my senior year would go (fifth years, wya?) but this is the first time in a long time that I am actually happy to be going to class.
For a long while, it felt like I had been slowly losing the will to keep up with schoolwork. It felt like I wasn’t learning anything, and it was getting to be very discouraging. That’s not to imply that my professors aren’t good at their jobs of course, but there’s a definite disconnect in online learning. Online classes are very impersonal, and I hated sitting and staring at a screen for hours on end.
Burnout hit fast and hard at the end of the spring semester. I had made it through finals unscathed but with so much uncertainty regarding the fall semester, I just didn’t have it in me to sit through ANOTHER semester totally online.
So when IUP announced in June that the university was planning on returning to face-to-face instruction, I felt a glimmer of hope. And although we’re only going into our third week of the semester, it seems like it’s off to a good start.