Atharv Agrawal is from Mumbai, India. He is a student at the University of Toronto in the Munk One program, a special cohort of 25 students from all over the world, including Singapore, Malaysia, Peru, Senegal and the United Arab Emirates. Atharv is studying economics, data analytics, and peace, conflict and justice studies.
Where were you when you heard about the Covid-19 pandemic?
I am graduating in a couple of months. The sudden turn of events caused by the pandemic has created uncertainty about what will become of my career plans.
As the spectre of Covid-19 casts a shadow over my career path, I am choosing to focus on the benefits it could bring.
Reframing
The cohort of students who, like me, are adjusting to the impact of Covid-19 are, willingly or otherwise, pedagogical pioneers. We are the first to have had to adjust, as a cohort, to digitally dominant learning styles.
One week before going back home
They’re being so overdramatic. My friends and I were supposed to go to a concert tonight, but it was cancelled at the last minute over health concerns. The first cases of the coronavirus are being detected in France, but I don’t get the big deal. My priority? To have fun while I can. Sure, the situation is rapidly evolving all across the world, but there’s no way that something that serious could also happen here, right?
11 hours before
Dear students
Being on the cusp of a new university term, especially the summer term, is a delicious, nervy business. For some students, there is excitement about what lies ahead – new ideas to encounter, people to come back to, unmet challenges to meet. Alongside, there is the inevitable trepidation: the unknown quantities of exams, fears of under-performance, self-doubt.
We live in changing and uncertain times, and I believe that the role of the student is evolving along with the fierce competitiveness of an interconnected global job market. Growing rates of global inequality, persistent levels of poverty and the climate change conundrum are among the seismic challenges that our world faces, as well as the current coronavirus outbreak.
I am of the opinion that, whether at undergraduate or postgraduate level, students can make a difference.
I wasn’t entirely sure I’d be glad to be back in South Korea this spring, my third, which has – as always – brought with it fleeting weeks of candyfloss clouds in both the sky and the cherry tree branches. The pale pinkish-white flowers blossoming all over my campus at KAIST in Daejeon lend a romantic air to the university for a brief season every year.
Although usually an idyllic period, this time the tranquility is exceptional; the absence of the visitors who normally crowd the picnic and photo spots has left an odd stillness.
The coronavirus outbreak has been a wake-up call for many countries on how they deliver their education. And it has presented particular challenges for most sub-Saharan African countries where higher education has long operated under the traditional classroom model, owing to limited online resources.
So far a small number of privately run universities have tried to use virtual delivery modes. But most universities are public institutions with shoestring budgets – mostly from government funding and a little revenue from a few Income Generating Units (IGUs).
Last November, the semester at universities in Hong Kong was cut short after protests spilled on to campuses.
At that time, students could barely contemplate the possibility of switching to online mode. Some professors were flooded with emails from students struggling to present in groups in an online class or being able to complete assignments without library access. How things have changed.
I’ve now been away from the classroom for a few weeks. In isolation, I have very little motivation to work on my end of semester assignments with remote direction, refreshing my university inbox for updates on upcoming exams, and searching job boards for a miraculous influx of new opportunities.
I remember waking up one Friday morning in February to a notice from my university, Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT), informing me that I was to be placed on a leave of absence (LOA) with immediate effect. One of my classmates had tested positive for Covid-19 and had been admitted to hospital for treatment.
In line with the measures put in place by Singapore’s Ministry of Health at the time, SIT had mandated that the entire cohort of Year 3 telematics students were to be placed on LOA. We were also reminded to seek medical treatment should we feel unwell.