By Rory Lamberton

It may seem like stating the obvious to say that the covid pandemic has affected everyone and anyone in several ways. It has had a much more brutal impact on others than me and my peers, but this is our story, and I believe it’s important that as we graduate, we tell it.

Beginning university in 2020 in a world locked down was hard enough, and having to continue our course through multiple strikes was the last straw. It wasn’t until my fourth year that I admitted to myself – it was far too late in the game for it to get any better.

University is meant to be a whole new way of living for students, especially those of us freshly out of school. A soft landing into adulthood. Lockdown just brought a completely dire spin on this, which left us all trapped and isolated for the rest of our course.

Matthew Reddick, a student due to graduate from Glasgow Caledonian University this summer, feels disillusioned by his time at university: “Everything just seems a bit bleaker now, and [going to] university is supposed to help with that, not make it worse. Overall, I just expected it to be a much more open experience, more hopeful.”

Finlay Davidson, who attends the University of Strathclyde and is also graduating this year, says university felt like something he was just doing on the side. “I’ve never really felt like a student. Covid and the strikes were a huge deterrent to university life.”

2020 became a great liminal point in our lives. Covid lockdowns were strange for everyone, but, for many, there was the universal constant of work. Those of us who began university in 2020 were booted out of school never to return, and essentially had to spend months, waiting. This level of uncertainty was extremely disconcerting; of course, there was no normal, and this discomfort just kept rolling on.

Reddick spoke about the difficulties of online learning in his first and second years. “It is so much harder to be engaged, and 50-odd minutes of an online lecture from a PowerPoint presentation is boring,” he admitted. “Tell me you don’t know anyone who fell asleep during a 9am online class and I’d call you a liar. I really enjoyed doing my dissertation, but first and second year might as well not have happened.”

The sheer number of opportunities – either socially or academically – we have been robbed of is unthinkable. As we close in on our final student days, reflecting on what we have lost, there is a feeling that we have collectively failed to make the connections that make being a student worthwhile. The only comfort we can take is that we have all been in the same position together.

For people who have not experienced this, I can appreciate that it’s hard to imagine, but being cut off and isolated from campus and our peers has tarnished our university experience from day one. Many people feel they are due to leave university without one of the main things they came here for – lifelong friends.

Davidson feels that online learning in his first two years of university made it “impossible to make top-tier friendships.” Alexander Chisholm, also from Strathclyde, agreed, finding it difficult to have any sort of engagement with classmates.

For Reddick, the lack of time spent in-person has ruined the whole university experience. “It feels like the opportunity to socialise had been ripped away from me. You hear about the university experience from folk who have been through it, and I just think, that’s not what it was like,” he said. “People make lifelong friends from uni, and I’m not saying it was impossible but, it was certainly much harder for us.”

This feeling of failing to connect with peers at university didn’t just last the length of the Covid restrictions, but the length of course. “The lack of university friends meant that I was less likely to join any societies or clubs, as there was no one to go with or encourage me,” Davidson said of his social life outside of classes.

Liza Bone, of Glasgow Caledonian University, says she expected much more of a group feeling. “Seeing people three to four days a week didn’t happen until halfway through my third year, by then it was too late. Besides two people, I know no one. This makes me nervous for my graduation ball.”

This left those in our year with a feeling of unease once we finally made it to campus, unsure where anything was or where we should go. I often look at other students, perhaps just starting their courses, meeting and formulating connections with each other in the way we should have. Learning the right way together, as opposed to failing apart. I detest them for what they have. It’s a fierce, powerless type of jealousy; it’s not the type that I could run over and steal something from them like Covid did to me. We’ve lost something that is gone forever.

In our third year, on-campus activities were back in a semi-normal fashion, albeit alien to us. But the class dynamic has never recovered. Once returned to a semi-normal class setting – with facemasks and several strikes – people didn’t really know what to do with themselves.

Chisholm reflects on his first in-person classes: “At first, it was a relief to actually be sat in-person together… but the awkwardness of breakout rooms and bad connections stood out from that early time.” It was clear that nobody knew each other in the way that they comfortably should by their third year. This unease has damaged our ability to learn from each other. People were meeting others for the first time the way they should have two years prior – there was no way to amend that.

Bone emphatically agrees that the initial class dynamic was awkward: “Barely anyone speaks up in seminars…. One lecturer mentioned this a couple of months ago, specifically that my year group were quiet and less responsive.” This appears to be true across both facilities and universities – there is a theme here that the class of 2024 didn’t know how to properly learn at university due to a lack of on-campus learning, and, as a result, were scared to go near each other. But the truth is that we’ve all missed out.

Regardless of the so-called “experience” – that if we’ve worked hard enough, we shall all leave university with a degree, just like every other year group – the unmovable forces of luck and circumstance mean that we have all had to trade in our student life for a much more watered-down version of events. But that doesn’t mean to say that our grades haven’t been affected either.

One of the big problems with online learning is that it is much harder to be motivated. When stuck at home far away from campus, Bone said she did all of her university lectures, seminars, research, and coursework in one room.

Procrastination was a big issue for Davidson, too: “Assignments were done a day or two before being due as I just didn’t care enough to start earlier. My first two years were basically spent locked away in a room with Wi-Fi, with very little time spent on-campus, It saps motivation to do your best work, and by the time fourth year came, I was checked out from uni as a whole.

Although Chisholm agrees that Covid has definitely impacted his studies, he feels that he was more hindered by the strikes that took place in his third year. “Not finding out results for assignments was frustrating because I didn’t know how I could improve or even if what I had done was actually good.”

Without essential feedback, many of us went into our honours year blind, which undoubtedly diminished our chances of completing our best work. This just shows that although the lockdown was long gone, we were still getting slashed left, right, and centre throughout our course.

And of course, this brings us up to the present day, looking into the future. A few weeks ago, I received an email from my course heads, asking if I would be interested in continuing my studies with a master’s degree. As nice as it was to be asked, I suddenly realised that in good faith, I couldn’t continue like this. This stems mainly from not feeling the student spirit – there is a lack of connection with the university, its campus, its staff, and my fellow students.

Clearly from those I’ve spoken to,  I’m not the only one. “I do not have much motivation to stay with the university to earn my master’s,” Bone admitted. “I have no connection to the uni; it doesn’t feel like a community to me as I never see anyone I know. Every time I went on-campus, 95% of the people I had never seen before.”

Chisholm says that dealing with his degree in almost two completely different setups “made university feel much longer than it actually was”. Davidson is also dying to leave the loose clutches of university. “Once this year is done, I’m done with school I just want to get into work now,” he said.

We will all still leave with a degree, which is ultimately what we all came here for, but this time in our lives won’t be looked back on as fondly as it could have been. The worst thing is that we cannot put our finger on exactly what we missed, as we’ll never know for certain. All we can say is that there has been no soul in our studies, and the connection has been broken from day one.

If you’re still a student, or yet to be one, cherish what you have. You don’t know how good you’ve got it. To the rest of the class of 2024, our year has just been a blip of missing everything and anything – but it’s okay, we made it out, together. Yes, we have been robbed of whatever this was meant to be, but we shall put it behind us and move on to bigger and better things.

In the end, we should make a promise to ourselves – since being a student couldn’t be done properly, let’s just make sure we retire correctly, whatever year that may be…