Why the Corona Semester Should Be Seen as an Opportunity

Embrace the Corona semester as an opportunity. Online learning prepares you for future work, saves time, and offers flexible study. Universities are student-friendly during this period.

It's not surprising that the Corona lockdown caused some panic among some students last semester. And it raised many questions like "What happens to my studies now?" or "How am I supposed to finish this semester?"

Even if the summer was a bit calmer in terms of the pandemic, it is hitting students again with great force in the new semester. For the second time, the Corona crisis is putting a strain on German higher education, and as a result, most lectures are taking place online. Face-to-face seminars, internships, and small group exercises are hardly taking place (anymore), and the sense of community in the crowded lecture hall is giving way to isolated learning in the home office. The upcoming winter semester is therefore also subject to the conditions of the Corona pandemic.

The Corona pandemic has also changed studying, and currently, it is hardly comparable to a classic on-campus study. Especially first-year students certainly imagined their start to university differently. Deserted lecture halls, online lectures, and learning in the home office, however, do not have to be a disadvantage. The Corona semester can be an opportunity and should be interpreted with the words of Max Frisch: "A crisis is a productive state. One only has to remove the taste of catastrophe from it."

This means that during an online semester, you predominantly study from home. You attend lectures on your laptop, borrow textbooks digitally, and meet your fellow students not in the cafeteria, but for example, in a WhatsApp group. Working from home has become the norm in 2020 not only for students but also for the rest of society. And because this new variant is working so well, the majority of employers can now very well imagine continuing to rely on new work concepts and home office after the Corona crisis.

With an online study from home, you are, in fact, preparing for the working conditions of the future – without having to pay for expensive courses or attend lengthy retraining programs. In this way, one can even claim: Studying in Germany has never been as modern as it is this year.

In Doubt for the Students

Since universities and colleges were just as surprised by Corona as all of us, many are still in a strategic finding process. This, in turn, can be an advantage for students, because universities and colleges are naturally anxious not to disadvantage anyone. After all, in the worst case, they could be sued for it.