Q: What is your typical school day like now that everything is online?

When I wake up it's usually 9 a.m. and everything is online right now. I'm usually just waiting along for an email from the professor to let me know what exactly I'm doing for the day. It usually takes most of my day to do all of my homework and since the teachers assume that no one has a job, my teachers have been really piling on the reading.

Q: What issues are you having right now at school, can you explain?

Well, I have one teacher who has pre-recorded all of his lectures and is currently uploading them. We had this assignment for that class where we had to do a mini-essay on a film we recently watched and we were also supposed to do replies. On the syllabus, it said we had two to three days from the original movie posting to do the assignment, so I assumed it was due at 3 p.m. because the class is from 12:30 to 3:15. But apparently, it was due at 12:30 and that was not communicated on the syllabus. It just gave a very vague two days. Who's to determine it wasn't due for example on Friday at midnight. So there was that. I have another class where we're forced to have groups and communicate with each other and I sent everyone a message and no one replied to me. So I had to go to the professor and let him know that I wasn't getting anywhere with the rest of my classmates. He updated me to a new reading group and so I went ahead and messaged my new group members and they each took a while to respond.

"It usually takes most of my day to do all of my homework and since the teachers assume that no one has a job, my teachers have been really piling on the reading."

Q: Has your University done anything to help out the students who are learning online?

No. They cut our tuition buy a couple of hundred dollars but the money came from canceling our transportation cards that come with our tuition. A lot of people use those cards in order to get around the city so I felt like they really didn't do anything with refunding us our money other than making things a little harder for other people. I, for example, use public transportation in order to get around, and now that I don't have that, I have to look for other ways to get to my job and things like that.

Q: Have your teachers done anything to help you out as far as providing resources and things like that?

Most of them are nice enough to accommodate around the homework thing. For example, I missed something on the syllabus but they were pretty understanding about that. Most of the teachers have really been going through it since it is the first week and so they're cracking down on us so that we can get everything together. But other than that, no they really haven't provided anything.

Q: Have you been able to successfully communicate with any other people in your class?

I'm in a seminar class right now and within that class, I have a group chat that I use to communicate with the other students about assignments and things the professor has said.

Q: Have you been able to meet anyone new through this online learning situation?

No, every person I talk to currently is someone that I know. Usually, I have to just get lucky by either finding someone I went to high school with or someone I met in other classes.

Q: And how is it like keeping in contact with the people you already know?

Social media. It's easier to keep track of people there.

"Every person I talk to currently is someone that I know. Usually, I have to just get lucky by either finding someone I went to high school with or someone I met in other classes."

Q: Would you say that your homework is more piled on compared to last semester?

Yeah, well I mean most of the stuff we’re assigned you can really just glance over it. But I feel like right now, I'm in a lot of classes where I don't exactly understand what it is that we're going over. So then I'm force to do the readings and they're usually really long dense papers.

Q: If you have a question, are your teachers at least getting back to you as fast as possible?

Yeah. I want to say there's only one professor who's been kind of difficult during this time.

Q: How is it like having to attend your lectures and do all of your assignments from one spot?

I'm too antsy, I get way too distracted. For example, I'll start doing an assignment and then I'll walk away and go eat and then I'll come back and move somewhere else and do my assignments at a different area in my room. It's really hard for me to actually sit still and do my homework. However, I do feel like I am learning a lot better because a lot of the times I'm like ‘wow, I actually have to teach myself this material’. Like the teachers aren't really giving a lot of hand-holding, it's more kind of discussing what we're learning which can be kind of scary.

Q: Any other concerns with your current school experience?

None of my teachers are really tech-savvy. So all of the professors are uploading their streams and Zoom meetings really differently. Most of my cinema teachers have gotten it down because they're kind of used to those kinds of platforms, but the department's who are clearly underfunded and have really old teachers cannot get with the tech and it's kind of embarrassing because half of the time those professors get their lectures out really late or they'll upload it but there will be like an audio issue. For example, I have one teacher who records her videos on Zoom, so whenever she uploads it, she does it in 15-minute segments. So there are five different links for us to watch the lecture because it's broken down into so many different parts. Overall, it's not fun. I'm really stressed out and I feel like I don't even have my weekends to relax anymore.