A Revolution from COVID-19

We are halfway through the Spring quarter and I have started to feel that time is flying by really fast. As I remember, the Spring quarter used to be my favorite time of the academic year because it is the end of a year and it is a great time to reflect what I have accomplished in the past year. I used to have a really wonderful plan for this Spring quarter, my last quarter at UCSB. I planned on concluding my job as a CLAS tutor in a memorable way and saying goodbyes to my supervisors. I also planned to take graduation pictures with my friends from ISAB, ISA, and my fellow senior tutors at CLAS. It hit me really hard when I heard that the whole Spring quarter will be operated remotely because that was the moment when all my plans for the Spring quarter turned into millions of impossibilities. I guess people always have the ability to adjust themselves to different situations and eventually find out a way to live with it. It is just a process that takes time and effort. 

I have a friend from ISA who is also a tutor at CLAS. He said that no one has ever been to his drop-in hours so far, and it has been five weeks already. I decided to visit him during his drop-in hour last week. We talked about how the COVID-19 situation is going to permanently change the education system as a whole. There is a lot of things we can do online, but we just did not get to experiment with them until when we needed them. Online learning has become a possibility for education and the system has also become more flexible, in which geographical and time issues no longer exist. People will be able to access material and receive education whenever they want to. We both realized that one of the biggest challenges when doing remote learning is to have good time management skills and to be self-responsible. It is common to hear people complaining about not having the motivation to study and having a loose work schedule, where they are not as productive as they were when we had in-person learning. I think even though this is a challenging process to go through, it is also a great opportunity for us to learn how to be responsible for ourselves and adjust our lifestyle and work style according to the situation we are placed in; however, the one trade-off that I see is the loss of social interaction with other students. Participating in clubs and working with people has been a huge part of the college memory. Through the experience of interacting with people has helped me develop a more well-rounded and flexible personality. I think this is something we can only obtain through actual interaction with people. 

If we really slow down and see how COVID-19 has changed all aspects of our lives, we might realize that it has brought us the opportunity to explore things that we did not have a chance to discover in the past. It has also brought us a potential revolution in education and society as a whole. This might prove the saying that sometimes things that look bad might also have a bright side that is worth looking at.

P.S. I will always remember how the sunlight shines through and fades into the bike paths in front of lecture halls in the evening at UCSB.